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Kent Dana Lecture audio file and transcript

Kent Dana Lecture, November, 2004

Kent Dana
November, 2004.
Re: Journalism
Glendale Arizona Oral History Project
Project director: Diane Nevill
Transcribed by: Jardee Transcription, Tucson, Arizona
JULIE: I think we’ll get started, because we’ll run short of time if we don’t. There are other classes that will just kind of quietly come in.
I want to tell you a little bit about Kent Dana, our guest speaker, because he has such a strong background in Arizona. He’s been a valley news icon for as long as I can remember, and I think any of you who’ve been in the valley since the seventies recognize Kent Dana too. He’s also a family member of GCC—at least we count him that way. He’s not an official alum, but his wife, Janet, and several of his children have attended GCC. So we count him as an alum, sometimes he gets called an alum, which creates some problems for him, but certainly we can adopt [him].
DANA: Thank you.
JULIE: But he actually attended ASU, and then he went to Brigham Young University because there was a chance to work on the radio up there. Then he came back to Arizona and worked for KOOL Radio-TV—correct?
DANA: Uh-huh.
JULIE: And then went to Channel 12, where he was an anchor there for twenty-five years—started out writing news for them. And then just last April switched over to KPHO, Channel 5, which was a huge benefit for them. We were just talking about the Nielsen ratings, but they’ve shown that the Nielsen ratings, combined with the May readings and the July readings went up 56% for KPHO, counting the past, I think since they measured it from a year ago last May, forward—so including the time that Kent shifted over to KPHO, their ratings have gone up 56%. And he was a big part of why they decided to start making changes in their format.
He’s also—what I’ve always really enjoyed about Kent is his warmth and personality and his integrity. Those of you who’ve been students of mine know how big integrity and ethics are for me, for journalism. And this is a person who has continuously had the credibility strong in that area, even when other journalism competitors have struggled, he’s always been there reporting the news as true as he knows it. In fact, some people call him the Tom Brokaw of Arizona. I really think, though—and I wrote this to him the other day—that he’s the Walter Cronkite of Arizona because when you think of Walter Cronkite, he’s called “the most trusted man in America.” And I really think that Kent Dana is our most trusted newscaster, news anchor, in Arizona. So I’d like to present to you, Kent Dana. (applause)
DANA: Thank you. I don’t know if Julie’s ever wanted to work in a station promotion department, but she just did a fine job there—a little embellishing here and there—but thank you very much for those kind words. She did mention that in one of her e-mails she said she compared me to the Walter Cronkite of Arizona, which is a tremendous honor. It reminded me of one Saturday back when I was at Channel 10 in the late seventies. In those days I was kind of a one-man band. I did weekend news there, and I’d go to work about eight o’clock and I’d get a camera and I’d go out and start shooting stories. And then I’d come back and I’d put the film—not tape, film—into a processor, we’d process the [film], and then I’d write the story and we’d cut the story and get it ready, and then I’d sit down and I would actually write the newscast, and then sit down and anchor the newscast. And then I’d do the same thing for the ten [o’clock news]. So my weekends there were long, and I got a lot of good experience. And one Saturday it was about fifteen minutes before the news, and a huge monsoon storm rolled in. There was a lightning strike about a half a block from the station, and it knocked all of our equipment haywire. We did get everything back on within about five minutes, but when we started the newscast, you know, “Good evening, this is ‘KOOL TV News,’” dah dah dah. I introduced the first story, it was supposed to pitch to the filmed segment—nothing. Came back to me, I said, “Well, we’re having problems with that story. Our second story is��� dah-dah dah-dah dah. Here’s …” So-and-So. Nothing! Now I’m getting a little worried. I read a couple of readers, pitched to the third story—nothing. So then I thought, “Well, I can always go to weather, because he’s right here.” So we went to weather, and he talked and he talked and he talked. Came back to me. I said, “I think we have everything straightened out,” I pitched to the first story again, and a commercial came up. I mean, it was like this the whole newscast. We call it “Black Saturday” over at Channel 10.
Well, after the newscast, the owner of the station—this name may mean nothing to anybody—Tom Chauncey, who was the long-time owner of that station, and partners with Gene Autry—called us, and he said, “What happened?” And we said, “We had a power surge, everything went bad,” and he said, “Well, that’s unfortunate. I’m here at the Biltmore Hotel in a hotel room with a couple of visitors that came into town, and I wanted to show off my station and how well we were doing. The visitors are Dick Salant”—who was the president of CBS News—“and Walter Cronkite.” And I thought, “Well, I never wanted to work in New York anyway, and it doesn’t really matter.” But then I started thinking, “You know, Walter Cronkite probably had a newscast or two just like that,” and probably was the one that understood it the most.
I’m glad to take this opportunity to spend some time with you today, partly because it seems like recently I have been to quite a few schools, and the oldest group I’ve talked to are sixth-graders. And it’s kind of nice to talk to some adults and people who are on the verge of doing what they want to do, possibly in this business or related fields. Because the sixth-graders have a little different—first of all, a lot of them don’t know who I am, they don’t watch TV, or they certainly don’t watch TV news. Well, they watch TV, but not TV news. And their questions are a little different. I usually get things like, “Who’s the prettiest co-anchor you’ve ever worked with? Do you sometimes wear shorts behind that desk, and not wear pants? What’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened? What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened?” And then, of course, the question that they always ask several times, because I don’t always answer it, is “How much money do you make?” So it is good to meet with some people who have perhaps some really good criticisms of what we do. And that’s really what I like to hear. We’re going to open this up for questions a little bit later, and that’s how I’ll kind of get a sense of what you think of television news, and ways that we could improve it.
Julie mentioned that I was born in Phoenix, at Good Samaritan Hospital. In fact, my dad was born in Arizona. My grandfather was born in Arizona. And my dad was actually a broadcaster. He was one of the radio pioneers at KOY Radio years ago, and then he actually got a TV program at Channel 5. It was kind of a western variety topical show once a week. We had to go out and buy a TV set just because my dad was going to be on TV. Grew up in a very large family, we didn’t have a lot of money, five girls and one brother plus me. This was a big event for us. But even though my dad was in radio and then he had the TV show, I never really thought in terms of making this a profession. It wasn’t something I dreamed about for years. So getting into television for me was more by accident. I was just an average student in high school, went on to my first year at ASU, and after one year….
(cell phone rings) That’s probably my desk saying that there’s spot news somewhere and I need to go.
I actually wanted to be a lawyer, maybe go into business, didn’t really have any designs to get into television. At the beginning of the summer after my freshman year, a good friend of mine called and said, “Hey, I’ve got a great adventure, if you’re interested. I can train you to be a disc jockey” at this very small radio station up in Utah. And I said, “Man, that sounds great!” So I packed my stuff, went up there, and spent a fun summer just working as a night-time disc jockey for about $3.50 an hour, and was totally happy with that, and kind of got a taste of broadcasting from that standpoint. Well, that summer I also decided to take a couple of courses in broadcasting, which I did. I liked them, and so I changed my major and got a degree in radio and television.
However, when I moved back to Phoenix, tried to get a job in this business, it was tough. Didn’t have any offers, so I got into other things. I actually joined my uncle in a family business. He had some gas stations, and I opened up two gas stations that had car washes.
About that time, my efforts of knocking on the doors here at the local stations paid off, and I was contacted and asked if I wanted to do just part-time radio news at what was then KOOL Radio, which was a part of Channel 10, which of course they’ve changed the call letters now. It was KOOL Radio & TV, and they wanted me to do radio news, and I was just excited.
Let me go back a little bit. One of my dad’s first days in this business was at KOY and it was a Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. He was on duty the morning of Pearl Harbor. My first day, I had to go in at about three in the morning and just do some writing for radio, and I walked in and the place is just buzzing. Well, I hadn’t been listening to my car radio, because it was broken; didn’t realize that that was the morning after the night that Robert Kennedy was shot. So my first day was rather adventuresome too. My son Joe, who is now at Channel 12, his first job was in Flagstaff, Arizona, and he was hired to write and report for their early-morning show, and his first day was September 11, 2001. So all three of us have had kind of an interesting first day in this business, and it certainly got our adrenalin going for us.
So anyhow, I started the gas stations. I happened to own them during the oil embargo of 1973. You guys are probably way too young to even know about this, but lines at gas stations and everything. And because I was part-time at KOOL, Bill Close, who was then the main anchor, the news director, he ran the news department, talked me into opening up my stations at midnight every night, without the lights on, so that we could fill up the news cars. Otherwise, these cars would be empty that next morning, and they couldn’t go out and cover news.
I worked there for about six years, doing weekend news. And let me just tell you how I started doing weekend anchoring, because I was a reporter and loving it. That’s still my first love, is just getting out and reporting. And one Friday Bill Close called me into his office and he said, “Our weekend anchor has just quit.” And by the way, his name was Ted Knight. Now, for you TV history buffs, there’s a little bit of a connection there. He was the famous anchor on “The Mary Tyler [Moore] Show.” But anyway, his name was Ted Knight, he’d quit, and what they said was, “What we would like to do is try you out as an anchor.” This was Friday. He said, “You’ll anchor both Saturday and Sunday, and then we’re going to meet Monday morning and make a decision to see how you did.” Well, people say, “Were you nervous?” Yes I was nervous. I got up Saturday morning, and for the first time since I was sixteen, I had a pimple on my nose, and spent a very frustrating and pressure-filled weekend. But it apparently worked out, because then I started doing the weekend anchoring there. But then I still got to report during the week.
Spent about six years there, and then in 1979 Channel 12 called and asked if I’d be interested in working for them, which I did for about twenty-five years, until a little over a year ago when we were up for contracts again, and I was approached out of the blue by Channel 5, had no intention of switching, didn’t want to move, all my friends were at 12. We had some negotiations back and forth, and I certainly wasn’t asking Channel 12 to match anything that 5 did. I was very happy to stay there, but I wanted them to show a little bit of interest in keeping me, and apparently they were going through some times where they thought that maybe a new face would be good for them too, so I made the switch. Anyway, I sat out for six months, because that was in my contract, that if I did leave for any reason, I couldn’t be on anybody’s air for six months. But I was getting paid, so that’s not all bad. My wife thought that was a great plan! Except the fact that she wanted me out of the house once in a while.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed the transition. I was very worried, I was scared, I was nervous. People said, “Well, it���s like riding a bike, you just go sit down and start anchoring again.” I wasn’t sure of that. But they’ve been very kind to me over at Channel 5 and I’ve enjoyed that.
I’d like to talk a little bit about the kinds of stories that I’ve covered, not just sitting at the anchor desk. The fun part of my job is to report. And I’ve been lucky. Back when I was at Channel 12, it seemed like any time there was a huge disaster in California, I was on the next plane and covering fires and riots and flooding and earthquakes, the O. J. Simpson trial. I was also the first Phoenix reporter to be sent to Oklahoma City when the bombing occurred. Spent about six days doing that kind of reporting. To me that’s really the fun part of this job, is to get out and do stories and meet with people and try to put on something that the audience understands and can relate to.
But the most favorite story that I’ve ever done was actually a series of stories, about a thousand of them. Some of you who happened to watch Channel 12 over the last few years might remember a series that I did called “Wednesday’s Child.” “Wednesday’s Child” was an effort on our part to match up kids that didn’t have homes, with people who might be interested in adopting. Right now there’s about close to 5,000 children in Arizona who have either been abandoned, they’ve been abused and taken from their families, they were born with severe handicaps and therefore their parents didn’t want to keep them—a whole variety of reasons—but there’s a big chunk of those kids here in our state. And so we thought, “Let’s try to come up with something that would give these kids a chance to perhaps meet families and be adopted.” And so we came up with a story idea called “Wednesday’s Child,” where once a week I would spend time with these kids individually, sometimes sibling groups—two, three, four, five kids—and do an activity that they liked to do, try to get them to warm up, talk about their life and their hopes. In some cases, they were really little—one and two and three. Sometimes they couldn’t talk, they didn’t have that ability. But then we would introduce them on this special program, “Wednesday’s Child,” which was actually part of the newscast. It was during our ten o’clock newscast. And the neat thing for me was that over this period of twenty years, again, we met about a thousand kids, and about 80% of them were adopted, they found homes. And that was very rewarding to me personally. It was really a tangible example of how television can impact lives. To this day I get occasionally calls or letters or e-mails from some of these kids that we met over the years, and that still continues to be a very rewarding thing for me.
Now, on the downside—this is just a little bit of dirt—we had a change of news directors who came in and made the decision that “Wednesday’s Child” was not news, that it needs to be taken away from the ten o’clock—in fact, taken away from the afternoon news—and they started running them at 5 a.m. And I think we have nine people watching at 5 a.m. It ceased to be effective, and it frustrated me, and so we parted ways on that series. And hopefully we’re going to be able to bring it back in a different form on Channel 5.
Anyway, people over the years have said, “Well, were you ever tempted to adopt any of these kids?” Well yeah! I mean, some of them just went right to your heart, and it was tough doing that series sometimes. These two little girls, I remember we were in Yuma once, the one was about three, one was about six, and we were at a park and playing and everything, and I had to go back and pick up some more tape from the car, and the little six-year-old said, “Can I go with you?” And I said, “Yes.” We’re walking along and all of a sudden she reaches up and she takes my hand and she says, “Would you be my daddy?” And it was like…. You know, those are the stories that really get to you.
And it’s not a tribute to me, or even Channel 12, that all these kids were adopted. I think it’s a tribute, really, to the people in the state. You know, when people understand a problem, they generally respond to it in a way that sometimes surprises you. We featured once this group of five kids, African Americans, oldest was about twelve, youngest was about four or five, but they wanted to stay together. We knew that would be tough, because there are not a lot of black families on the adoption registry, and it would take somebody to really be committed to want to adopt them. And so I decided to take them swimming at my house. I asked them, “Do you guys swim?” And they said, “Oh yeah, we swim every day!” “Well, good!” So we went to my house and got our suits on, and the photographer said, “Well, I’ve got an idea. I’m going to set up on the other side of the pool. You guys come running out of the house, and all of you jump in the pool at the same time.” I said, “That sounds like a good way to start it.” So he got all set up, we got all ready, we go running out, we jump in the water, laughing, and all of a sudden I look around, and two of them are at the bottom of the pool. And so there was this moment of panic, and I got them out and everything. I said, “I thought you guys said you swam every day!” Well, to them, swimming was this pool in their back yard that was about this deep, and they’d never been in a big pool.
But the neat thing was that two weeks later there was a family that came forward and said they wanted to adopt all five of these kids. I was just amazed, I was floored. And I told the adoption worker, “Well, you tell them how grateful I am that they’re going to do this, and would they contact me when the adoption is final, because I want to do a follow-up story.” Well about six months later she called and said, “The adoption is final, but they don’t want to do a follow-up story because they don’t think they’ve done anything special.” And I said, “Well, you tell them that I think that they have.” Well, about a year went by, year and a half, and I was at the airport one day, waiting for a plane, and here comes this family walking down the concourse. It was a mom and dad and eight kids. And I started looking at some of these kids, and they just looked real familiar, and then I realized that it was the five kids that I had had in my back yard and almost drowned two of them.
So I went up to the parents and I just said, “You know, I feel bad because I never had a chance to thank you personally for what you did. That was amazing.” And they said, “You know, we feel bad, because we never called you to thank you for bringing these kids into our lives.” Well, it’s times like that, when what we do in TV really pays off. That will always be, I guess, my favorite kind of story that I did. It certainly wasn’t hard news, it wasn’t going to the scene of a disaster, it wasn’t exposing some politician, but it was affecting someone’s life, and that made it fun to do and interesting to do.
When I was given the assignment to cover the O. J. Simpson trial, my son Joe happened to be the editor of the Apollo High School newspaper. He was a senior, he was the editor, and he said, “Dad, you’re going over to L.A. to cover the trial?” And I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “I’d like to go with you and do a story on the media madness, something that high school kids could relate to.” And I said, “Sure, that’d be great.” So we flew over on a Sunday night, the trial was set to open Monday. And I’ll never forget, it was a rainy, rainy night in L.A. and we thought we’d drive by the courthouse, just to kind of get the lay of the land, where we were with the hotel and everything. And when we drove by the courthouse, we could see about five people with sleeping bags and coolers, and they’re just lined up there. So we stopped and went up to talk to them. And these were young students, high school, mostly college. And we said, “What are you doing here?” And they said, “We want to get into the trial, and we want to be first in line.” So of course Joe’s eyes light up, and he says, “Dad, I think I’d like to stay here with them. Is that okay?” And I’m thinking, “Oh, this is great, the middle of L.A., it’s a rainy night, a bunch of strangers, and he’s going to spend the night on the courthouse steps.” So I said, “Okay, just don’t tell your mom.”
So we went back to the hotel, got a blanket and a pillow, and he came back, and I didn’t sleep very well that night. In fact, he doesn’t know, but I got up a couple of times and just drove by, just to make sure that everybody was fine. But then he found out the next morning that it wasn’t first in line gets in, it was a lottery, and by now there’s sixty people, and there were only eight seats for the general public. So they passed out cards, and lo and behold, his name was drawn. So he went in for the first day of the trial. In fact, of the four days that we were there, he got in three times. And the only way I got in was when he loaned me his pass for the afternoon session. But he not only got to see the trial, but he interviewed the attorney, Shapiro. He interviewed O. J.’s grandmother. He got on CNN one day, because as he was coming out, something big had happened, and he was the most recent one out of the trial. So now he’s on national TV, doing his analysis of the O. J. Simpson trial. And when he got home, he wrote a story—he was one of the writers for the Rep, the high school version of the Republic—and it was such a good story they put it in the regular paper. So I was real proud of him, and always thought that he would be a newspaper journalist, but he decided that he would get into my field and get into TV. And for those of you that want to switch back and forth, he’s doing a good job. I’m very proud of him.
Young people are always asking me, “Well, what courses should I take that would help me become a broadcaster, get into broadcasting?” And I always tell them that there’s six courses that they have to master: “English, writing, English, writing, English, and writing.” People think if TV as pictures and visuals and exciting stuff, but you know, TV is really good writing. And if you enjoy writing, and if you enjoy telling a good story, that’s half the battle, because I’ll tell ya’, some of the young people that apply at TV stations cannot write a lick. And I don’t know what’s happening with our schools. They seem to have forgotten this part of it, or something, and all the good writers are going into newspapers, I guess, because the ones that are coming into TV, it’s painful to read sometimes. So we spend quite a bit of our time working with these people. We have a pretty good internship program at Channel 5. In fact, it’s the best one, I think, in the city. I think all the stations have an internship program of some kind, and it’s usually kids that are in college, maybe it’s their junior year, maybe their senior year, and they’ll spend three months with us, three or four months, and we try to give them a taste of everything. They’ll spend time on the assignment desk; they’ll spend time with the producers; they’ll spend time with editors, with photographers. They’ll go out on stories, and they get a pretty good idea of what the business is like. And so I would encourage anyone who’s interested when you get to that level, to go ahead and apply for an internship, if TV is something that you want to do. And let me just ask right now, how many of you are actually journalism students? Just your group? And you’re mostly newspaper? Is there anybody in the room that has any interest in getting into TV? Two.
STUDENT: I want to do radio.
DANA: That’d be good. And you raised your hand?
STUDENT: I want to do TV.
DANA: In what area?
STUDENT: Here, just like you, around the city. [unclear] Channel 5 or Channel 12.
DANA: Okay. Phoenix is a great market to work in. I lucked out, because most people get out of college; if they’re lucky, their first job is in Fresno, or it’s in Biloxi, or it’s in Bangor, Maine, or it’s in some little small market, far, far away. And then they move up. The whole thing in my business is you try to get up into a bigger market and get into a little more experience. When I started in Phoenix, it was the thirty-sixth-largest market in the country. Today it’s the fourteenth. So I’ve moved up all these spaces, and I’ve never had to pack a bag and move to another town. So I’ve really lucked out in that sense.
Phoenix is very, very competitive. As you know, everybody’s doing news and doing a pretty good job of it. It’s pretty cutthroat. We’re in ratings right now, and it’s a battle. It really is a battle, but it’s a fun battle, and those of us who are in it, for the most part wouldn’t do anything else. One of the downsides for me is that I have never, ever, had a normal schedule. I was doing weekends for about six years at Channel 10, and then when I went over to Channel 12 it was always from about one in the afternoon until ten or eleven at night. So that can be kind of tough on families. I’ve got six kids, they grew up knowing me in the summer, but in the winter they’d get up and go to school, and they’d come home and I’d be gone. I’d get home and they were in bed. So those are some of the things you have to kind of think of.
Also, you’re always on call if something big happens. If you’re out for the evening or on a weekend or whatever, if something big happens, they get ahold of you. So the key is, you turn off your cell phone. You’re always kind of attached to the station. If you’re available and you’re the person that they want for that story, you’re going to be called. But other than that, I cannot think of a better job and a better profession. I never have the same day twice. There’s always a new day and always something different. I don’t think I could go to work and kind of do the same thing every day. And that���s the nice thing about being in news, whether it’s television, radio, or newspaper, every day is going to be different. Every day there’s going to be a new story, every day there’s going to be a new challenge. And because of the creativity involved, and being able to find that fact that no one else has, or break a story, then it just makes it fun. It’s just a great job, and I can’t think of any…. The only other job that I would ever do is a bricklayer. And I’ve done that just on my own, and I’m pretty good at it. It’s very therapeutic. It’s a set amount of space and a certain kind of wall, and you just lay the bricks, and then there’s a great satisfaction. And twenty years from now, the brick wall will still be there. So I guess if I wasn’t doing this, I would be laying bricks.
I want to open it up to your questions, and I’ll try to answer as best as I can, as honestly as I can, anything that you might want to know about what we do. And if you have complaints, now’s your time to talk back to a news anchor. I know many of you have done it at home when you’re watching sometimes. Now’s your chance to put those thoughts into words.
STUDENT: So you went from doing radio to television. What are the major big differences, and what ultimately made you decide to stay in television? Is it better? Or did you have any reservations about doing [unclear]?
DANA: The biggest difference is I’m wearing makeup now. (class chuckles) Well, the biggest difference—I really like radio news. I like doing radio…. I mean, there’s just something about, you know, you get up, you just go to work. You don’t have to worry about what you look like or anything. But I think you can be a little more creative with radio. I’ve always felt like a good job would be like radio news at KTAR or one of the stations—good local news, where they go out and do stories, and they have a big-enough staff that they can spend the time doing it. In television, you’re always working in tandem with a photographer, you’re always trying to think visually, “How can I visualize this story?” And that sometimes holds you back a little bit in what you write. Because I can write a pretty good story, but if the photographer says, “Wait a minute, I have nothing to cover this, I have nothing to cover this.” So it’s more of a team thing in television. That’s really the main difference. Television news is changing so much because of the Internet. If you wanted to find out something that was happening right now, it would take you three minutes to go to the Internet, and you could find out everything you’re going to find out on our news tonight. So our challenge is to try to come up with stories that maybe you’re not going to find on the Internet, or a different approach to a story, or somehow get you to watch, because back when I started—she mentioned Bill Close—Bill Close was one of—there were only three stations. Well, there were four, I guess, with Channel 8. But there were only three commercial stations. And this generation doesn’t understand that. Three?! Three stations?! And because of that, Bill Close’s audience—they would get between 40% and 55% of the audience. That’s huge! That’s huge. Today, if we get 12% or 14%, we’ve had a real good day. Again, because there’s a lot more TV stations, and then you’ve got all the other choices on the TV dial. You can go anywhere and get your news.
STUDENT: There used to be newspapers, and then radio came along, then television. But now with the Internet and podcasts and everything, it seems like that’s sort of more cutting-edge news. Do you think that’s where the future is going? Like, should journalism students today try to get into television broadcasting, or should they try to go somewhere else?
DANA: I think you need to be versatile. I think you ought to be able to do all of it. One of the things that my son Joe has heads and shoulders over me, is he had a lot of Internet training, and he can do a lot of that new electronic stuff that his dad can’t, or wasn’t trained on. So the key is to be versatile. Now, most of the TV stations, ours included, we put our news, or a good portion of it, on the ’net right now. If you go to our website you can get the latest news. Well, I say the latest—it’s not always the latest, but it’s within three hours. And we’re getting better at that, trying to update stuff as it changes. But yeah, the key is to be versatile. I don’t think that we will ever…. I think that people who live in a town will always want to know what’s happening in their town. Therefore, you’re going to have to have some sort of a local news-gathering operation. And whether it ends up on a cable or on the ’net or whatever, doesn’t matter, but you’re always going to need your local news. But the days of the dominating network news are over, and I think the days of a dominating local TV station are over. But there’s always going to be a niche. Other questions?
JULIE: I’m curious about the diversity that we see in the media, and how cognizant is the media to issues of diversity? I think back to Hurricane Katrina, and how certain phrases are used with certain populations. How is the bias looked at? Is there real effort to make sure things are sensitive?
DANA: Yes. Half the time management runs scared, because they’re not purposely trying to be insensitive, but sometimes it just happens. They run scared when it comes to hiring people. They run scared when it comes to coverage. They really do try to balance it out, to the point of occasionally doing stories that wouldn’t be covered if it wasn’t for the effort to balance things out in the arena that you’re talking about. And we are very sensitive. Management tries to educate us in terms of the need to do that, and we really do have that.
JULIE: When you’re looking at the ratings right now, do they just aggregate the data? Do they look at specific populations, even gender, to see what connections we’re making [unclear]?
DANA: Oh, you’re very astute.
JULIE: I’m real interested.
DANA: Let me tell you how they measure the ratings. First of all, has anybody ever been asked to keep a diary or put a little item on your TV set to measure what you’re watching? (someone raises her hand) You have?
STUDENT: In San Diego.
DANA: Was it the diary, or was it the little box that fits on your TV?
STUDENT: The diary.
DANA: The diary. There used to be two ways they would take ratings. One was the diary, where they come to your house and they give you a diary that’s good for one month. And all they ask you to do is, every day when you turn on the TV, just say what time you’re turning it on, and what you’re watching. And they give you a little prize or fifty bucks or something. They make it a little bit worth your while. The other way was phone calls. They used to do ratings by phone calls on a twenty-four-hour basis. They had a phone bank of people that would just call up and say, “What are you watching right now? What are you watching right now?” And so it was two different companies: it was the ARB [Audience Research Board (?)] and the Nielsen Company. Well, now there’s only one company, and it’s Nielsen, and for the most part they come to your house and they say, “Can we attach this box to your TV set for a month?,” or “two months,” or “five months.” And what they try to do is get the demographics of a city. In other words, they kind of know what the age breakdown is, what the ethnic breakdown is, and so they’ll try to go to areas of the town, so that that measurement reflects what’s in the city.
Now, what they don’t know—and they can’t tell—is Johnny comes home from school and turns on the TV, and then walks out of the room and goes and plays a video game. Okay, now the TV’s on, and it might be on during the news. That TV set represents about 14,000 homes. And what that is telling the company then, is that there’s 14,000 people watching their news. Well maybe not. Maybe Johnny’s off on the Internet looking at something he shouldn’t look at. But his TV set is on to that, and therefore that’s the measurement. So it’s not an exact science.
We do ratings four times a year. We’re in the November ratings now. It’s November, February, May, and July. There are some markets that now have ratings 365 days a year, which I think is more accurate, because what you’ll notice is right now, this is when we put on the sexiest stories, the grabber stories, the transvestites who play in the symphony, or whatever we come up with. And we really push for these times of year to get you to watch something, so that you’ll at least tune in. But I think it’s a much more honest measurement when they measure us every day, because then there’s no surge and up and down and everything. Other questions? Yeah.
STUDENT: A lot of complaints I’ve heard in the past have been about the news focuses primarily on the negatives that happen around us. Do you think that if the news were to take a more positive swing and try to even it out and go, say, more on the positive side, do you think that the news could still succeed and still get high ratings?
DANA: That’s a very good question, and I agree that we do put more, much more of the negative, that is an unfair representation of our society. On the other side of the coin, your second half was, “Could a station succeed by putting more, if not all, good news?” No, it couldn’t. And I used to have two mock newspapers that I would bring in, and each one had their own headlines. And this one, most of the headlines were “School Bond Issue Passes,” “Governor Gets Award” for this, “Five-year-old Rescues Cat from Toilet.” All these things were generally good things. This one is more “Football Coach Gets Caught With Three Cheerleaders in his Bedroom,” “Mass Killing on the West Side, Eight People Dead, Four Heads Are Cut Off.” The point is, if I held that up, your eyes would go over here quick, and you’d want to know these things. When you’re driving down the freeway, some of the worst traffic jams in an accident are not in the lane where the accident is, it’s the oncoming lane, where people can see this accident. Everybody wants to take a look at the accident. They want to see a little blood, they want to see a body out there. That’s just kind of human nature. And sadly, that’s what TV feeds off of. There’s a saying, “If it bleeds, it leads,” in our business. And we will generally lead with the more sensational, attention-grabbing stories. I can tell you what everybody’s going to lead with tonight. You may not be aware of this—and this story lasted less than an hour: in Mesa this morning, a mother in a fairly new Tahoe has her six-month-old and her two-year-old in the back. She pulls up to a friend’s house, runs in for something, leaves her key in her car, the car is stolen, the kids are still in it, there��s an Amber Alert. Luckily, the thief had the sense to turn around and realized he’s got some young kids in here, and didn’t want any part of this, and he abandoned the car at a restaurant, and the kids are reunited with the family. At least two, maybe three, of the TV stations were over the scene. You see the father come up, and his kids and everything. That will probably…. Now that’s not really a bad-news story, but it’s a dramatic story, certainly, because you see the ending of it, and you see the kids reunited with their family. Unless something else happens today that tops that, that will probably lead every newscast tonight. That’s my prediction—and I haven’t even been to the station yet. Other questions?
STUDENT: My brother is an editor at a Tucson news station, and he has a good relationship with some of the TV anchors. Do you think it’s important to establish relationships with the people behind the camera?
DANA: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Her question is, “Do you think it’s important to establish good relationships between the anchors and the people behind [the scenes].” You know, they can make you look so good, and they can make you look so bad. I won’t tell you which station, and I won’t tell you which gender���in fact, I’ll tell you nothing, except there’s a person working in this market who acts like this person is really above those people. She…. (class laughs) This person orders them around, demands things that are silly, and this person is paying the price. I mean, it’s so stupid, and it’s silly, and luckily there’s not many of them that do that, but occasionally it happens. Some of my best friends are the people behind the scenes, because they’re more genuine—most of the time. Other questions?
STUDENT: Do you think the news actually forms—will occasionally form a bias in its effort to be politically correct?
DANA: Sure. Yeah, we do. Hopefully not often. But a lot of times it’s a kind of a feeding frenzy with news organizations, and they jump on a certain theme or a certain assumption, and just in the way they report it, it can form a bias. I think that’s true. But you know most of the time there’s someone in the room that recognizes that, and they try to end it.
I know some of you have another class to go to. If any of you ever want to come down to the station during a newscast, you can sit right there in the studio and watch everything unfold. It’s kind of a cheap date, and you’re certainly welcome to just call sometime and invite yourselves down, and we’ll try to give you a quick tour and show you what we do.
STUDENT: Is that common? Do a lot of people do that?
DANA: Not as common as the invitations I’ve given out, no. I mean, sometimes….
STUDENT: Do you have a little audience off to the side during every broadcast?
DANA: No, sometimes we’ll have groups of up to ten. Sometimes like a Cub Scout group or some journalism group from somewhere. The other thing I’ve done is I’ve given a lot of high school and grammar school graduation speeches, and there’s always a story I tell at the end. And what I say is, after I tell the story, I issue them a challenge. I say, “Look, if any of you can call me in four years, either after you graduate from high school or college, and tell me this story back, I will take you and a friend a dinner to any restaurant in town that you want to go to.” And over the years, I’ve taken a lot of kids to dinners. One year one kid was so anxious after his high school graduation, that he leaped over the—the cell phone was in his car—and he leaped over the fence, his robe caught on the fence, rips off his robe, and he makes it to his dad’s car and called me and there were like three others that called after that. I’ve had kids stop me in malls, and they’ll start telling me the story. I said, “Hey, it’s too late, your class graduated a long time ago.” But anyway…. Any other questions?
STUDENT: You talked about time being irregular, and your schedule not being normal. Is there anything that ever makes you want to leave the business and go open a bricklaying business?
DANA: (laughs) There are days when that really sounds good. But no. The next day might be much better. When you’re doing a story, like in California, like for the earthquakes and stuff, that day starts at seven in the morning usually, and doesn’t end until midnight or one or two. And so those are the days where you just collapse and say, “What am I doing in this business?!” But those are also where the adrenalin is pumping a little stronger, and it’s kind of fun. But I’ve never considered quitting … but there’s still time.
STUDENT: Do you guys today have any rules about verifying stories, that they’re true before broadcasting?
DANA: Oh, absolutely. And that’s part of the ethics that are learned, like at the basic level in college, where you…. We have made a few mistakes, but not too many, because there’s always somebody who’s asking a question, “Are we sure about this? Are we sure about this?” And there have been times when we have known a fact or we’ve been told a fact, and we haven’t put it on the air, another station has, and then of course we verify it, it’s true, but we will not put it on unless we verify it. And even in that process we’ve made mistakes. But it’s not on purpose. There’s never an effort to put something on just to be first, if you have not checked it out. At least that’s our rule. Other questions? Yes?
STUDENT: I’ve been told that pretty much in any journalist’s career life somewhere through time they’re going to think about at least falsifying a quote, a fact, a whole story—something along those lines. Have you ever been in that situation?
DANA: Yeah, I really wasn’t born at Good Samaritan Hospital. I was born at St. Joseph’s. (laughter) You know, I suppose the temptation is there, but no, the pressure’s never been that great to where you…. Yeah, you think about it, but it’s like a lot of things you think about that you never do.
You guys have been great! Nobody asked me what I made. This is great! When these young kids ask me, I say, “Well, how much do you make babysitting or doing a lawn?” They’ll tell me, and I say, “I make a little more than that.”
STUDENT: Who’s the prettiest anchorwoman you’ve ever [worked with]?
DANA: (laughs) You know, I’ve been lucky. In thirty-one years of anchoring, I can name practically on one hand the number of co-anchors. And most people in my business, there’s so much switching and trading around. My very first co-anchor was Linda Alvarez, who is still anchoring. She’s in Los Angeles. She’s a senior citizen, and that’s neat, because women generally don’t last as long as men in this business, and she’s right up there and doing very well. Patty Kirkpatrick was my second co-anchor, and she’s at Channel 3 right now. Jeanine Ford was my third. She’s still at Channel 12. Lin Sue Cooney was my fourth, and she’s at Channel 12. Fay [Fredricks] is still at Channel 12. And then the two that I have now, Diana and Catherine [Anaya]. I’ve been lucky.
STUDENT: How do you feel about the movie “Anchorman”?
DANA: I loved it! I thought that was hilarious. There were enough funny moments in there that were pretty close to being true, that I thought it was a great movie.
STUDENT: Aside from the anchor brawls.
DANA: Yeah, besides some of the crazy stuff, yeah. But no, it was funny. We actually had at Channel 12 in the early days, our weekend people. They had mixed up their names on the introduction, and the guy read his name as hers, and she read hers as his! And then there was this kind of, “Oh … what did we just say?” So some of [the movie] was very true.
STUDENT: So you did a story where they were talking about lie detector tests, and they asked you if you enjoyed working with Lin Sue.
DANA: Uh-huh.
STUDENT: What was the answer to that? And was it true when you said it?
DANA: The answer was “definitely,” and it was true. And my only regret with that story is that the promotion department got their slimy fingers on it, and they made too much of that question, leading up to the time we ran the story. In fact, I went in and said, “We gotta take this off the air.” And they didn’t listen to me. So that was kind of a black day for me. Lin Sue didn’t hold it against me, but her mother-in-law sent me a scathing letter. We’ve since made up, but she was not happy with that.
Other questions?
STUDENT: Do you think that the ratings get in the way of telling the stories that you really want to tell?
DANA: Yes.
STUDENT: I mean, do you think if you did that 365 days a year, [unclear]?
DANA: No. And the reason it wouldn’t is because you can’t have that kind of pressure 365 days a year. The stations have the luxury of putting pressure on for twenty-eight days solid. Then they can kind of relax. If it’s the same pressure all the time, then there’s no sense in…. You know, you can only do so much. I think it’d be better, and it’d be more honest.
STUDENT: To tell the stories that are really important (DANA: Right.) rather than just what’s sensational?
DANA: Right. (pause) Well, thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed being here. You’re a good audience.
(applause)
[END OF RECORDING]

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Kent Dana
November, 2004
Re: Journalism
Glendale Arizona Oral History Project
Project director: Diane Nevill
Transcribed by: Jardee Transcription, Tucson, Arizona
JULIE: I think we’ll get started, because we’ll run short of time if we don’t. There are other classes that will just kind of quietly come in.
I want to tell you a little bit about Kent Dana, our guest speaker, because he has such a strong background in Arizona. He’s been a valley news icon for as long as I can remember, and I think any of you who’ve been in the valley since the seventies recognize Kent Dana too. He’s also a family member of GCC—at least we count him that way. He’s not an official alum, but his wife, Janet, and several of his children have attended GCC. So we count him as an alum, sometimes he gets called an alum, which creates some problems for him, but certainly we can adopt [him].
DANA: Thank you.
JULIE: But he actually attended ASU, and then he went to Brigham Young University because there was a chance to work on the radio up there. Then he came back to Arizona and worked for KOOL Radio-TV—correct?
DANA: Uh-huh.
JULIE: And then went to Channel 12, where he was an anchor there for twenty-five years—started out writing news for them. And then just last April switched over to KPHO, Channel 5, which was a huge benefit for them. We were just talking about the Nielsen ratings, but they’ve shown that the Nielsen ratings, combined with the May readings and the July readings went up 56% for KPHO, counting the past, I think since they measured it from a year ago last May, forward—so including the time that Kent shifted over to KPHO, their ratings have gone up 56%. And he was a big part of why they decided to start making changes in their format.
He’s also—what I’ve always really enjoyed about Kent is his warmth and personality and his integrity. Those of you who’ve been students of mine know how big integrity and ethics are for me, for journalism. And this is a person who has continuously had the credibility strong in that area, even when other journalism competitors have struggled, he’s always been there reporting the news as true as he knows it. In fact, some people call him the Tom Brokaw of Arizona. I really think, though—and I wrote this to him the other day—that he’s the Walter Cronkite of Arizona because when you think of Walter Cronkite, he’s called “the most trusted man in America.” And I really think that Kent Dana is our most trusted newscaster, news anchor, in Arizona. So I’d like to present to you, Kent Dana. (applause)
DANA: Thank you. I don’t know if Julie’s ever wanted to work in a station promotion department, but she just did a fine job there—a little embellishing here and there—but thank you very much for those kind words. She did mention that in one of her e-mails she said she compared me to the Walter Cronkite of Arizona, which is a tremendous honor. It reminded me of one Saturday back when I was at Channel 10 in the late seventies. In those days I was kind of a one-man band. I did weekend news there, and I’d go to work about eight o’clock and I’d get a camera and I’d go out and start shooting stories. And then I’d come back and I’d put the film—not tape, film—into a processor, we’d process the [film], and then I’d write the story and we’d cut the story and get it ready, and then I’d sit down and I would actually write the newscast, and then sit down and anchor the newscast. And then I’d do the same thing for the ten [o’clock news]. So my weekends there were long, and I got a lot of good experience. And one Saturday it was about fifteen minutes before the news, and a huge monsoon storm rolled in. There was a lightning strike about a half a block from the station, and it knocked all of our equipment haywire. We did get everything back on within about five minutes, but when we started the newscast, you know, “Good evening, this is ‘KOOL TV News,’” dah dah dah. I introduced the first story, it was supposed to pitch to the filmed segment—nothing. Came back to me, I said, “Well, we’re having problems with that story. Our second story is” dah-dah dah-dah dah. Here’s …” So-and-So. Nothing! Now I’m getting a little worried. I read a couple of readers, pitched to the third story—nothing. So then I thought, “Well, I can always go to weather, because he’s right here.” So we went to weather, and he talked and he talked and he talked. Came back to me. I said, “I think we have everything straightened out,” I pitched to the first story again, and a commercial came up. I mean, it was like this the whole newscast. We call it “Black Saturday” over at Channel 10.
Well, after the newscast, the owner of the station—this name may mean nothing to anybody—Tom Chauncey, who was the long-time owner of that station, and partners with Gene Autry—called us, and he said, “What happened?” And we said, “We had a power surge, everything went bad,” and he said, “Well, that’s unfortunate. I’m here at the Biltmore Hotel in a hotel room with a couple of visitors that came into town, and I wanted to show off my station and how well we were doing. The visitors are Dick Salant”—who was the president of CBS News—“and Walter Cronkite.” And I thought, “Well, I never wanted to work in New York anyway, and it doesn’t really matter.” But then I started thinking, “You know, Walter Cronkite probably had a newscast or two just like that,” and probably was the one that understood it the most.
I’m glad to take this opportunity to spend some time with you today, partly because it seems like recently I have been to quite a few schools, and the oldest group I’ve talked to are sixth-graders. And it’s kind of nice to talk to some adults and people who are on the verge of doing what they want to do, possibly in this business or related fields. Because the sixth-graders have a little different—first of all, a lot of them don’t know who I am, they don’t watch TV, or they certainly don’t watch TV news. Well, they watch TV, but not TV news. And their questions are a little different. I usually get things like, “Who’s the prettiest co-anchor you’ve ever worked with? Do you sometimes wear shorts behind that desk, and not wear pants? What’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened? What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened?” And then, of course, the question that they always ask several times, because I don’t always answer it, is “How much money do you make?” So it is good to meet with some people who have perhaps some really good criticisms of what we do. And that’s really what I like to hear. We’re going to open this up for questions a little bit later, and that’s how I’ll kind of get a sense of what you think of television news, and ways that we could improve it.
Julie mentioned that I was born in Phoenix, at Good Samaritan Hospital. In fact, my dad was born in Arizona. My grandfather was born in Arizona. And my dad was actually a broadcaster. He was one of the radio pioneers at KOY Radio years ago, and then he actually got a TV program at Channel 5. It was kind of a western variety topical show once a week. We had to go out and buy a TV set just because my dad was going to be on TV. Grew up in a very large family, we didn’t have a lot of money, five girls and one brother plus me. This was a big event for us. But even though my dad was in radio and then he had the TV show, I never really thought in terms of making this a profession. It wasn’t something I dreamed about for years. So getting into television for me was more by accident. I was just an average student in high school, went on to my first year at ASU, and after one year….
(cell phone rings) That’s probably my desk saying that there’s spot news somewhere and I need to go.
I actually wanted to be a lawyer, maybe go into business, didn’t really have any designs to get into television. At the beginning of the summer after my freshman year, a good friend of mine called and said, “Hey, I’ve got a great adventure, if you’re interested. I can train you to be a disc jockey” at this very small radio station up in Utah. And I said, “Man, that sounds great!” So I packed my stuff, went up there, and spent a fun summer just working as a night-time disc jockey for about $3.50 an hour, and was totally happy with that, and kind of got a taste of broadcasting from that standpoint. Well, that summer I also decided to take a couple of courses in broadcasting, which I did. I liked them, and so I changed my major and got a degree in radio and television.
However, when I moved back to Phoenix, tried to get a job in this business, it was tough. Didn’t have any offers, so I got into other things. I actually joined my uncle in a family business. He had some gas stations, and I opened up two gas stations that had car washes.
About that time, my efforts of knocking on the doors here at the local stations paid off, and I was contacted and asked if I wanted to do just part-time radio news at what was then KOOL Radio, which was a part of Channel 10, which of course they’ve changed the call letters now. It was KOOL Radio & TV, and they wanted me to do radio news, and I was just excited.
Let me go back a little bit. One of my dad’s first days in this business was at KOY and it was a Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. He was on duty the morning of Pearl Harbor. My first day, I had to go in at about three in the morning and just do some writing for radio, and I walked in and the place is just buzzing. Well, I hadn’t been listening to my car radio, because it was broken; didn’t realize that that was the morning after the night that Robert Kennedy was shot. So my first day was rather adventuresome too. My son Joe, who is now at Channel 12, his first job was in Flagstaff, Arizona, and he was hired to write and report for their early-morning show, and his first day was September 11, 2001. So all three of us have had kind of an interesting first day in this business, and it certainly got our adrenalin going for us.
So anyhow, I started the gas stations. I happened to own them during the oil embargo of 1973. You guys are probably way too young to even know about this, but lines at gas stations and everything. And because I was part-time at KOOL, Bill Close, who was then the main anchor, the news director, he ran the news department, talked me into opening up my stations at midnight every night, without the lights on, so that we could fill up the news cars. Otherwise, these cars would be empty that next morning, and they couldn’t go out and cover news.
I worked there for about six years, doing weekend news. And let me just tell you how I started doing weekend anchoring, because I was a reporter and loving it. That’s still my first love, is just getting out and reporting. And one Friday Bill Close called me into his office and he said, “Our weekend anchor has just quit.” And by the way, his name was Ted Knight. Now, for you TV history buffs, there’s a little bit of a connection there. He was the famous anchor on “The Mary Tyler [Moore] Show.” But anyway, his name was Ted Knight, he’d quit, and what they said was, “What we would like to do is try you out as an anchor.” This was Friday. He said, “You’ll anchor both Saturday and Sunday, and then we’re going to meet Monday morning and make a decision to see how you did.” Well, people say, “Were you nervous?” Yes I was nervous. I got up Saturday morning, and for the first time since I was sixteen, I had a pimple on my nose, and spent a very frustrating and pressure-filled weekend. But it apparently worked out, because then I started doing the weekend anchoring there. But then I still got to report during the week.
Spent about six years there, and then in 1979 Channel 12 called and asked if I’d be interested in working for them, which I did for about twenty-five years, until a little over a year ago when we were up for contracts again, and I was approached out of the blue by Channel 5, had no intention of switching, didn’t want to move, all my friends were at 12. We had some negotiations back and forth, and I certainly wasn’t asking Channel 12 to match anything that 5 did. I was very happy to stay there, but I wanted them to show a little bit of interest in keeping me, and apparently they were going through some times where they thought that maybe a new face would be good for them too, so I made the switch. Anyway, I sat out for six months, because that was in my contract, that if I did leave for any reason, I couldn’t be on anybody’s air for six months. But I was getting paid, so that’s not all bad. My wife thought that was a great plan! Except the fact that she wanted me out of the house once in a while.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed the transition. I was very worried, I was scared, I was nervous. People said, “Well, it’s like riding a bike, you just go sit down and start anchoring again.” I wasn’t sure of that. But they’ve been very kind to me over at Channel 5 and I’ve enjoyed that.
I’d like to talk a little bit about the kinds of stories that I’ve covered, not just sitting at the anchor desk. The fun part of my job is to report. And I’ve been lucky. Back when I was at Channel 12, it seemed like any time there was a huge disaster in California, I was on the next plane and covering fires and riots and flooding and earthquakes, the O. J. Simpson trial. I was also the first Phoenix reporter to be sent to Oklahoma City when the bombing occurred. Spent about six days doing that kind of reporting. To me that’s really the fun part of this job, is to get out and do stories and meet with people and try to put on something that the audience understands and can relate to.
But the most favorite story that I’ve ever done was actually a series of stories, about a thousand of them. Some of you who happened to watch Channel 12 over the last few years might remember a series that I did called “Wednesday’s Child.” “Wednesday’s Child” was an effort on our part to match up kids that didn’t have homes, with people who might be interested in adopting. Right now there’s about close to 5,000 children in Arizona who have either been abandoned, they’ve been abused and taken from their families, they were born with severe handicaps and therefore their parents didn’t want to keep them—a whole variety of reasons—but there’s a big chunk of those kids here in our state. And so we thought, “Let’s try to come up with something that would give these kids a chance to perhaps meet families and be adopted.” And so we came up with a story idea called “Wednesday’s Child,” where once a week I would spend time with these kids individually, sometimes sibling groups—two, three, four, five kids—and do an activity that they liked to do, try to get them to warm up, talk about their life and their hopes. In some cases, they were really little—one and two and three. Sometimes they couldn’t talk, they didn’t have that ability. But then we would introduce them on this special program, “Wednesday’s Child,” which was actually part of the newscast. It was during our ten o’clock newscast. And the neat thing for me was that over this period of twenty years, again, we met about a thousand kids, and about 80% of them were adopted, they found homes. And that was very rewarding to me personally. It was really a tangible example of how television can impact lives. To this day I get occasionally calls or letters or e-mails from some of these kids that we met over the years, and that still continues to be a very rewarding thing for me.
Now, on the downside—this is just a little bit of dirt—we had a change of news directors who came in and made the decision that “Wednesday’s Child” was not news, that it needs to be taken away from the ten o’clock—in fact, taken away from the afternoon news—and they started running them at 5 a.m. And I think we have nine people watching at 5 a.m. It ceased to be effective, and it frustrated me, and so we parted ways on that series. And hopefully we’re going to be able to bring it back in a different form on Channel 5.
Anyway, people over the years have said, “Well, were you ever tempted to adopt any of these kids?” Well yeah! I mean, some of them just went right to your heart, and it was tough doing that series sometimes. These two little girls, I remember we were in Yuma once, the one was about three, one was about six, and we were at a park and playing and everything, and I had to go back and pick up some more tape from the car, and the little six-year-old said, “Can I go with you?” And I said, “Yes.” We’re walking along and all of a sudden she reaches up and she takes my hand and she says, “Would you be my daddy?” And it was like…. You know, those are the stories that really get to you.
And it’s not a tribute to me, or even Channel 12, that all these kids were adopted. I think it’s a tribute, really, to the people in the state. You know, when people understand a problem, they generally respond to it in a way that sometimes surprises you. We featured once this group of five kids, African Americans, oldest was about twelve, youngest was about four or five, but they wanted to stay together. We knew that would be tough, because there are not a lot of black families on the adoption registry, and it would take somebody to really be committed to want to adopt them. And so I decided to take them swimming at my house. I asked them, “Do you guys swim?” And they said, “Oh yeah, we swim every day!” “Well, good!” So we went to my house and got our suits on, and the photographer said, “Well, I’ve got an idea. I’m going to set up on the other side of the pool. You guys come running out of the house, and all of you jump in the pool at the same time.” I said, “That sounds like a good way to start it.” So he got all set up, we got all ready, we go running out, we jump in the water, laughing, and all of a sudden I look around, and two of them are at the bottom of the pool. And so there was this moment of panic, and I got them out and everything. I said, “I thought you guys said you swam every day!” Well, to them, swimming was this pool in their back yard that was about this deep, and they’d never been in a big pool.
But the neat thing was that two weeks later there was a family that came forward and said they wanted to adopt all five of these kids. I was just amazed, I was floored. And I told the adoption worker, “Well, you tell them how grateful I am that they’re going to do this, and would they contact me when the adoption is final, because I want to do a follow-up story.” Well about six months later she called and said, “The adoption is final, but they don’t want to do a follow-up story because they don’t think they’ve done anything special.” And I said, “Well, you tell them that I think that they have.” Well, about a year went by, year and a half, and I was at the airport one day, waiting for a plane, and here comes this family walking down the concourse. It was a mom and dad and eight kids. And I started looking at some of these kids, and they just looked real familiar, and then I realized that it was the five kids that I had had in my back yard and almost drowned two of them.
So I went up to the parents and I just said, “You know, I feel bad because I never had a chance to thank you personally for what you did. That was amazing.” And they said, “You know, we feel bad, because we never called you to thank you for bringing these kids into our lives.” Well, it’s times like that, when what we do in TV really pays off. That will always be, I guess, my favorite kind of story that I did. It certainly wasn’t hard news, it wasn’t going to the scene of a disaster, it wasn’t exposing some politician, but it was affecting someone’s life, and that made it fun to do and interesting to do.
When I was given the assignment to cover the O. J. Simpson trial, my son Joe happened to be the editor of the Apollo High School newspaper. He was a senior, he was the editor, and he said, “Dad, you’re going over to L.A. to cover the trial?” And I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “I’d like to go with you and do a story on the media madness, something that high school kids could relate to.” And I said, “Sure, that’d be great.” So we flew over on a Sunday night, the trial was set to open Monday. And I’ll never forget, it was a rainy, rainy night in L.A. and we thought we’d drive by the courthouse, just to kind of get the lay of the land, where we were with the hotel and everything. And when we drove by the courthouse, we could see about five people with sleeping bags and coolers, and they’re just lined up there. So we stopped and went up to talk to them. And these were young students, high school, mostly college. And we said, “What are you doing here?” And they said, “We want to get into the trial, and we want to be first in line.” So of course Joe’s eyes light up, and he says, “Dad, I think I’d like to stay here with them. Is that okay?” And I’m thinking, “Oh, this is great, the middle of L.A., it’s a rainy night, a bunch of strangers, and he’s going to spend the night on the courthouse steps.” So I said, “Okay, just don’t tell your mom.”
So we went back to the hotel, got a blanket and a pillow, and he came back, and I didn’t sleep very well that night. In fact, he doesn’t know, but I got up a couple of times and just drove by, just to make sure that everybody was fine. But then he found out the next morning that it wasn’t first in line gets in, it was a lottery, and by now there’s sixty people, and there were only eight seats for the general public. So they passed out cards, and lo and behold, his name was drawn. So he went in for the first day of the trial. In fact, of the four days that we were there, he got in three times. And the only way I got in was when he loaned me his pass for the afternoon session. But he not only got to see the trial, but he interviewed the attorney, Shapiro. He interviewed O. J.’s grandmother. He got on CNN one day, because as he was coming out, something big had happened, and he was the most recent one out of the trial. So now he’s on national TV, doing his analysis of the O. J. Simpson trial. And when he got home, he wrote a story—he was one of the writers for the Rep, the high school version of the Republic—and it was such a good story they put it in the regular paper. So I was real proud of him, and always thought that he would be a newspaper journalist, but he decided that he would get into my field and get into TV. And for those of you that want to switch back and forth, he’s doing a good job. I’m very proud of him.
Young people are always asking me, “Well, what courses should I take that would help me become a broadcaster, get into broadcasting?” And I always tell them that there’s six courses that they have to master: “English, writing, English, writing, English, and writing.” People think if TV as pictures and visuals and exciting stuff, but you know, TV is really good writing. And if you enjoy writing, and if you enjoy telling a good story, that’s half the battle, because I’ll tell ya’, some of the young people that apply at TV stations cannot write a lick. And I don’t know what’s happening with our schools. They seem to have forgotten this part of it, or something, and all the good writers are going into newspapers, I guess, because the ones that are coming into TV, it’s painful to read sometimes. So we spend quite a bit of our time working with these people. We have a pretty good internship program at Channel 5. In fact, it’s the best one, I think, in the city. I think all the stations have an internship program of some kind, and it’s usually kids that are in college, maybe it’s their junior year, maybe their senior year, and they’ll spend three months with us, three or four months, and we try to give them a taste of everything. They’ll spend time on the assignment desk; they’ll spend time with the producers; they’ll spend time with editors, with photographers. They’ll go out on stories, and they get a pretty good idea of what the business is like. And so I would encourage anyone who’s interested when you get to that level, to go ahead and apply for an internship, if TV is something that you want to do. And let me just ask right now, how many of you are actually journalism students? Just your group? And you’re mostly newspaper? Is there anybody in the room that has any interest in getting into TV? Two.
STUDENT: I want to do radio.
DANA: That’d be good. And you raised your hand?
STUDENT: I want to do TV.
DANA: In what area?
STUDENT: Here, just like you, around the city. [unclear] Channel 5 or Channel 12.
DANA: Okay. Phoenix is a great market to work in. I lucked out, because most people get out of college; if they’re lucky, their first job is in Fresno, or it’s in Biloxi, or it’s in Bangor, Maine, or it’s in some little small market, far, far away. And then they move up. The whole thing in my business is you try to get up into a bigger market and get into a little more experience. When I started in Phoenix, it was the thirty-sixth-largest market in the country. Today it’s the fourteenth. So I’ve moved up all these spaces, and I’ve never had to pack a bag and move to another town. So I’ve really lucked out in that sense.
Phoenix is very, very competitive. As you know, everybody’s doing news and doing a pretty good job of it. It’s pretty cutthroat. We’re in ratings right now, and it’s a battle. It really is a battle, but it’s a fun battle, and those of us who are in it, for the most part wouldn’t do anything else. One of the downsides for me is that I have never, ever, had a normal schedule. I was doing weekends for about six years at Channel 10, and then when I went over to Channel 12 it was always from about one in the afternoon until ten or eleven at night. So that can be kind of tough on families. I’ve got six kids, they grew up knowing me in the summer, but in the winter they’d get up and go to school, and they’d come home and I’d be gone. I’d get home and they were in bed. So those are some of the things you have to kind of think of.
Also, you’re always on call if something big happens. If you’re out for the evening or on a weekend or whatever, if something big happens, they get ahold of you. So the key is, you turn off your cell phone. You’re always kind of attached to the station. If you’re available and you’re the person that they want for that story, you’re going to be called. But other than that, I cannot think of a better job and a better profession. I never have the same day twice. There’s always a new day and always something different. I don’t think I could go to work and kind of do the same thing every day. And that’s the nice thing about being in news, whether it’s television, radio, or newspaper, every day is going to be different. Every day there’s going to be a new story, every day there’s going to be a new challenge. And because of the creativity involved, and being able to find that fact that no one else has, or break a story, then it just makes it fun. It’s just a great job, and I can’t think of any…. The only other job that I would ever do is a bricklayer. And I’ve done that just on my own, and I’m pretty good at it. It’s very therapeutic. It’s a set amount of space and a certain kind of wall, and you just lay the bricks, and then there’s a great satisfaction. And twenty years from now, the brick wall will still be there. So I guess if I wasn’t doing this, I would be laying bricks.
I want to open it up to your questions, and I’ll try to answer as best as I can, as honestly as I can, anything that you might want to know about what we do. And if you have complaints, now’s your time to talk back to a news anchor. I know many of you have done it at home when you’re watching sometimes. Now’s your chance to put those thoughts into words.
STUDENT: So you went from doing radio to television. What are the major big differences, and what ultimately made you decide to stay in television? Is it better? Or did you have any reservations about doing [unclear]?
DANA: The biggest difference is I’m wearing makeup now. (class chuckles) Well, the biggest difference—I really like radio news. I like doing radio…. I mean, there’s just something about, you know, you get up, you just go to work. You don’t have to worry about what you look like or anything. But I think you can be a little more creative with radio. I’ve always felt like a good job would be like radio news at KTAR or one of the stations—good local news, where they go out and do stories, and they have a big-enough staff that they can spend the time doing it. In television, you’re always working in tandem with a photographer, you’re always trying to think visually, “How can I visualize this story?” And that sometimes holds you back a little bit in what you write. Because I can write a pretty good story, but if the photographer says, “Wait a minute, I have nothing to cover this, I have nothing to cover this.” So it’s more of a team thing in television. That’s really the main difference. Television news is changing so much because of the Internet. If you wanted to find out something that was happening right now, it would take you three minutes to go to the Internet, and you could find out everything you’re going to find out on our news tonight. So our challenge is to try to come up with stories that maybe you’re not going to find on the Internet, or a different approach to a story, or somehow get you to watch, because back when I started—she mentioned Bill Close—Bill Close was one of—there were only three stations. Well, there were four, I guess, with Channel 8. But there were only three commercial stations. And this generation doesn’t understand that. Three?! Three stations?! And because of that, Bill Close’s audience—they would get between 40% and 55% of the audience. That’s huge! That’s huge. Today, if we get 12% or 14%, we’ve had a real good day. Again, because there’s a lot more TV stations, and then you’ve got all the other choices on the TV dial. You can go anywhere and get your news.
STUDENT: There used to be newspapers, and then radio came along, then television. But now with the Internet and podcasts and everything, it seems like that’s sort of more cutting-edge news. Do you think that’s where the future is going? Like, should journalism students today try to get into television broadcasting, or should they try to go somewhere else?
DANA: I think you need to be versatile. I think you ought to be able to do all of it. One of the things that my son Joe has heads and shoulders over me, is he had a lot of Internet training, and he can do a lot of that new electronic stuff that his dad can’t, or wasn’t trained on. So the key is to be versatile. Now, most of the TV stations, ours included, we put our news, or a good portion of it, on the ’net right now. If you go to our website you can get the latest news. Well, I say the latest—it’s not always the latest, but it’s within three hours. And we’re getting better at that, trying to update stuff as it changes. But yeah, the key is to be versatile. I don’t think that we will ever…. I think that people who live in a town will always want to know what’s happening in their town. Therefore, you’re going to have to have some sort of a local news-gathering operation. And whether it ends up on a cable or on the ’net or whatever, doesn’t matter, but you’re always going to need your local news. But the days of the dominating network news are over, and I think the days of a dominating local TV station are over. But there’s always going to be a niche. Other questions?
JULIE: I’m curious about the diversity that we see in the media, and how cognizant is the media to issues of diversity? I think back to Hurricane Katrina, and how certain phrases are used with certain populations. How is the bias looked at? Is there real effort to make sure things are sensitive?
DANA: Yes. Half the time management runs scared, because they’re not purposely trying to be insensitive, but sometimes it just happens. They run scared when it comes to hiring people. They run scared when it comes to coverage. They really do try to balance it out, to the point of occasionally doing stories that wouldn’t be covered if it wasn’t for the effort to balance things out in the arena that you’re talking about. And we are very sensitive. Management tries to educate us in terms of the need to do that, and we really do have that.
JULIE: When you’re looking at the ratings right now, do they just aggregate the data? Do they look at specific populations, even gender, to see what connections we’re making [unclear]?
DANA: Oh, you’re very astute.
JULIE: I’m real interested.
DANA: Let me tell you how they measure the ratings. First of all, has anybody ever been asked to keep a diary or put a little item on your TV set to measure what you’re watching? (someone raises her hand) You have?
STUDENT: In San Diego.
DANA: Was it the diary, or was it the little box that fits on your TV?
STUDENT: The diary.
DANA: The diary. There used to be two ways they would take ratings. One was the diary, where they come to your house and they give you a diary that’s good for one month. And all they ask you to do is, every day when you turn on the TV, just say what time you’re turning it on, and what you’re watching. And they give you a little prize or fifty bucks or something. They make it a little bit worth your while. The other way was phone calls. They used to do ratings by phone calls on a twenty-four-hour basis. They had a phone bank of people that would just call up and say, “What are you watching right now? What are you watching right now?” And so it was two different companies: it was the ARB [Audience Research Board (?)] and the Nielsen Company. Well, now there’s only one company, and it’s Nielsen, and for the most part they come to your house and they say, “Can we attach this box to your TV set for a month?,” or “two months,” or “five months.” And what they try to do is get the demographics of a city. In other words, they kind of know what the age breakdown is, what the ethnic breakdown is, and so they’ll try to go to areas of the town, so that that measurement reflects what’s in the city.
Now, what they don’t know—and they can’t tell—is Johnny comes home from school and turns on the TV, and then walks out of the room and goes and plays a video game. Okay, now the TV’s on, and it might be on during the news. That TV set represents about 14,000 homes. And what that is telling the company then, is that there’s 14,000 people watching their news. Well maybe not. Maybe Johnny’s off on the Internet looking at something he shouldn’t look at. But his TV set is on to that, and therefore that’s the measurement. So it’s not an exact science.
We do ratings four times a year. We’re in the November ratings now. It’s November, February, May, and July. There are some markets that now have ratings 365 days a year, which I think is more accurate, because what you’ll notice is right now, this is when we put on the sexiest stories, the grabber stories, the transvestites who play in the symphony, or whatever we come up with. And we really push for these times of year to get you to watch something, so that you’ll at least tune in. But I think it’s a much more honest measurement when they measure us every day, because then there’s no surge and up and down and everything. Other questions? Yeah.
STUDENT: A lot of complaints I’ve heard in the past have been about the news focuses primarily on the negatives that happen around us. Do you think that if the news were to take a more positive swing and try to even it out and go, say, more on the positive side, do you think that the news could still succeed and still get high ratings?
DANA: That’s a very good question, and I agree that we do put more, much more of the negative, that is an unfair representation of our society. On the other side of the coin, your second half was, “Could a station succeed by putting more, if not all, good news?” No, it couldn’t. And I used to have two mock newspapers that I would bring in, and each one had their own headlines. And this one, most of the headlines were “School Bond Issue Passes,” “Governor Gets Award” for this, “Five-year-old Rescues Cat from Toilet.” All these things were generally good things. This one is more “Football Coach Gets Caught With Three Cheerleaders in his Bedroom,” “Mass Killing on the West Side, Eight People Dead, Four Heads Are Cut Off.” The point is, if I held that up, your eyes would go over here quick, and you’d want to know these things. When you’re driving down the freeway, some of the worst traffic jams in an accident are not in the lane where the accident is, it’s the oncoming lane, where people can see this accident. Everybody wants to take a look at the accident. They want to see a little blood, they want to see a body out there. That’s just kind of human nature. And sadly, that’s what TV feeds off of. There’s a saying, “If it bleeds, it leads,” in our business. And we will generally lead with the more sensational, attention-grabbing stories. I can tell you what everybody’s going to lead with tonight. You may not be aware of this—and this story lasted less than an hour: in Mesa this morning, a mother in a fairly new Tahoe has her six-month-old and her two-year-old in the back. She pulls up to a friend’s house, runs in for something, leaves her key in her car, the car is stolen, the kids are still in it, there’s an Amber Alert. Luckily, the thief had the sense to turn around and realized he’s got some young kids in here, and didn’t want any part of this, and he abandoned the car at a restaurant, and the kids are reunited with the family. At least two, maybe three, of the TV stations were over the scene. You see the father come up, and his kids and everything. That will probably…. Now that’s not really a bad-news story, but it’s a dramatic story, certainly, because you see the ending of it, and you see the kids reunited with their family. Unless something else happens today that tops that, that will probably lead every newscast tonight. That’s my prediction—and I haven’t even been to the station yet. Other questions?
STUDENT: My brother is an editor at a Tucson news station, and he has a good relationship with some of the TV anchors. Do you think it’s important to establish relationships with the people behind the camera?
DANA: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Her question is, “Do you think it’s important to establish good relationships between the anchors and the people behind [the scenes].” You know, they can make you look so good, and they can make you look so bad. I won’t tell you which station, and I won’t tell you which gender—in fact, I’ll tell you nothing, except there’s a person working in this market who acts like this person is really above those people. She…. (class laughs) This person orders them around, demands things that are silly, and this person is paying the price. I mean, it’s so stupid, and it’s silly, and luckily there’s not many of them that do that, but occasionally it happens. Some of my best friends are the people behind the scenes, because they’re more genuine—most of the time. Other questions?
STUDENT: Do you think the news actually forms—will occasionally form a bias in its effort to be politically correct?
DANA: Sure. Yeah, we do. Hopefully not often. But a lot of times it’s a kind of a feeding frenzy with news organizations, and they jump on a certain theme or a certain assumption, and just in the way they report it, it can form a bias. I think that’s true. But you know most of the time there’s someone in the room that recognizes that, and they try to end it.
I know some of you have another class to go to. If any of you ever want to come down to the station during a newscast, you can sit right there in the studio and watch everything unfold. It’s kind of a cheap date, and you’re certainly welcome to just call sometime and invite yourselves down, and we’ll try to give you a quick tour and show you what we do.
STUDENT: Is that common? Do a lot of people do that?
DANA: Not as common as the invitations I’ve given out, no. I mean, sometimes….
STUDENT: Do you have a little audience off to the side during every broadcast?
DANA: No, sometimes we’ll have groups of up to ten. Sometimes like a Cub Scout group or some journalism group from somewhere. The other thing I’ve done is I’ve given a lot of high school and grammar school graduation speeches, and there’s always a story I tell at the end. And what I say is, after I tell the story, I issue them a challenge. I say, “Look, if any of you can call me in four years, either after you graduate from high school or college, and tell me this story back, I will take you and a friend a dinner to any restaurant in town that you want to go to.” And over the years, I’ve taken a lot of kids to dinners. One year one kid was so anxious after his high school graduation, that he leaped over the—the cell phone was in his car—and he leaped over the fence, his robe caught on the fence, rips off his robe, and he makes it to his dad’s car and called me and there were like three others that called after that. I’ve had kids stop me in malls, and they’ll start telling me the story. I said, “Hey, it’s too late, your class graduated a long time ago.” But anyway…. Any other questions?
STUDENT: You talked about time being irregular, and your schedule not being normal. Is there anything that ever makes you want to leave the business and go open a bricklaying business?
DANA: (laughs) There are days when that really sounds good. But no. The next day might be much better. When you’re doing a story, like in California, like for the earthquakes and stuff, that day starts at seven in the morning usually, and doesn’t end until midnight or one or two. And so those are the days where you just collapse and say, “What am I doing in this business?!” But those are also where the adrenalin is pumping a little stronger, and it’s kind of fun. But I’ve never considered quitting … but there’s still time.
STUDENT: Do you guys today have any rules about verifying stories, that they’re true before broadcasting?
DANA: Oh, absolutely. And that’s part of the ethics that are learned, like at the basic level in college, where you…. We have made a few mistakes, but not too many, because there’s always somebody who’s asking a question, “Are we sure about this? Are we sure about this?” And there have been times when we have known a fact or we’ve been told a fact, and we haven’t put it on the air, another station has, and then of course we verify it, it’s true, but we will not put it on unless we verify it. And even in that process we’ve made mistakes. But it’s not on purpose. There’s never an effort to put something on just to be first, if you have not checked it out. At least that’s our rule. Other questions? Yes?
STUDENT: I’ve been told that pretty much in any journalist’s career life somewhere through time they’re going to think about at least falsifying a quote, a fact, a whole story—something along those lines. Have you ever been in that situation?
DANA: Yeah, I really wasn’t born at Good Samaritan Hospital. I was born at St. Joseph’s. (laughter) You know, I suppose the temptation is there, but no, the pressure’s never been that great to where you…. Yeah, you think about it, but it’s like a lot of things you think about that you never do.
You guys have been great! Nobody asked me what I made. This is great! When these young kids ask me, I say, “Well, how much do you make babysitting or doing a lawn?” They’ll tell me, and I say, “I make a little more than that.”
STUDENT: Who’s the prettiest anchorwoman you’ve ever [worked with]?
DANA: (laughs) You know, I’ve been lucky. In thirty-one years of anchoring, I can name practically on one hand the number of co-anchors. And most people in my business, there’s so much switching and trading around. My very first co-anchor was Linda Alvarez, who is still anchoring. She’s in Los Angeles. She’s a senior citizen, and that’s neat, because women generally don’t last as long as men in this business, and she’s right up there and doing very well. Patty Kirkpatrick was my second co-anchor, and she’s at Channel 3 right now. Jeanine Ford was my third. She’s still at Channel 12. Lin Sue Cooney was my fourth, and she’s at Channel 12. Fay [Fredricks] is still at Channel 12. And then the two that I have now, Diana and Catherine [Anaya]. I’ve been lucky.
STUDENT: How do you feel about the movie “Anchorman”?
DANA: I loved it! I thought that was hilarious. There were enough funny moments in there that were pretty close to being true, that I thought it was a great movie.
STUDENT: Aside from the anchor brawls.
DANA: Yeah, besides some of the crazy stuff, yeah. But no, it was funny. We actually had at Channel 12 in the early days, our weekend people. They had mixed up their names on the introduction, and the guy read his name as hers, and she read hers as his! And then there was this kind of, “Oh … what did we just say?” So some of [the movie] was very true.
STUDENT: So you did a story where they were talking about lie detector tests, and they asked you if you enjoyed working with Lin Sue.
DANA: Uh-huh.
STUDENT: What was the answer to that? And was it true when you said it?
DANA: The answer was “definitely,” and it was true. And my only regret with that story is that the promotion department got their slimy fingers on it, and they made too much of that question, leading up to the time we ran the story. In fact, I went in and said, “We gotta take this off the air.” And they didn’t listen to me. So that was kind of a black day for me. Lin Sue didn’t hold it against me, but her mother-in-law sent me a scathing letter. We’ve since made up, but she was not happy with that.
Other questions?
STUDENT: Do you think that the ratings get in the way of telling the stories that you really want to tell?
DANA: Yes.
STUDENT: I mean, do you think if you did that 365 days a year, [unclear]?
DANA: No. And the reason it wouldn’t is because you can’t have that kind of pressure 365 days a year. The stations have the luxury of putting pressure on for twenty-eight days solid. Then they can kind of relax. If it’s the same pressure all the time, then there’s no sense in…. You know, you can only do so much. I think it’d be better, and it’d be more honest.
STUDENT: To tell the stories that are really important (DANA: Right.) rather than just what’s sensational?
DANA: Right. (pause) Well, thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed being here. You’re a good audience.
(applause)
[END OF RECORDING]

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Kent Dana
November, 2004.
Re: Journalism
Glendale Arizona Oral History Project
Project director: Diane Nevill
Transcribed by: Jardee Transcription, Tucson, Arizona
JULIE: I think we’ll get started, because we’ll run short of time if we don’t. There are other classes that will just kind of quietly come in.
I want to tell you a little bit about Kent Dana, our guest speaker, because he has such a strong background in Arizona. He’s been a valley news icon for as long as I can remember, and I think any of you who’ve been in the valley since the seventies recognize Kent Dana too. He’s also a family member of GCC—at least we count him that way. He’s not an official alum, but his wife, Janet, and several of his children have attended GCC. So we count him as an alum, sometimes he gets called an alum, which creates some problems for him, but certainly we can adopt [him].
DANA: Thank you.
JULIE: But he actually attended ASU, and then he went to Brigham Young University because there was a chance to work on the radio up there. Then he came back to Arizona and worked for KOOL Radio-TV—correct?
DANA: Uh-huh.
JULIE: And then went to Channel 12, where he was an anchor there for twenty-five years—started out writing news for them. And then just last April switched over to KPHO, Channel 5, which was a huge benefit for them. We were just talking about the Nielsen ratings, but they’ve shown that the Nielsen ratings, combined with the May readings and the July readings went up 56% for KPHO, counting the past, I think since they measured it from a year ago last May, forward—so including the time that Kent shifted over to KPHO, their ratings have gone up 56%. And he was a big part of why they decided to start making changes in their format.
He’s also—what I’ve always really enjoyed about Kent is his warmth and personality and his integrity. Those of you who’ve been students of mine know how big integrity and ethics are for me, for journalism. And this is a person who has continuously had the credibility strong in that area, even when other journalism competitors have struggled, he’s always been there reporting the news as true as he knows it. In fact, some people call him the Tom Brokaw of Arizona. I really think, though—and I wrote this to him the other day—that he’s the Walter Cronkite of Arizona because when you think of Walter Cronkite, he’s called “the most trusted man in America.” And I really think that Kent Dana is our most trusted newscaster, news anchor, in Arizona. So I’d like to present to you, Kent Dana. (applause)
DANA: Thank you. I don’t know if Julie’s ever wanted to work in a station promotion department, but she just did a fine job there—a little embellishing here and there—but thank you very much for those kind words. She did mention that in one of her e-mails she said she compared me to the Walter Cronkite of Arizona, which is a tremendous honor. It reminded me of one Saturday back when I was at Channel 10 in the late seventies. In those days I was kind of a one-man band. I did weekend news there, and I’d go to work about eight o’clock and I’d get a camera and I’d go out and start shooting stories. And then I’d come back and I’d put the film—not tape, film—into a processor, we’d process the [film], and then I’d write the story and we’d cut the story and get it ready, and then I’d sit down and I would actually write the newscast, and then sit down and anchor the newscast. And then I’d do the same thing for the ten [o’clock news]. So my weekends there were long, and I got a lot of good experience. And one Saturday it was about fifteen minutes before the news, and a huge monsoon storm rolled in. There was a lightning strike about a half a block from the station, and it knocked all of our equipment haywire. We did get everything back on within about five minutes, but when we started the newscast, you know, “Good evening, this is ‘KOOL TV News,’” dah dah dah. I introduced the first story, it was supposed to pitch to the filmed segment—nothing. Came back to me, I said, “Well, we’re having problems with that story. Our second story is��� dah-dah dah-dah dah. Here’s …” So-and-So. Nothing! Now I’m getting a little worried. I read a couple of readers, pitched to the third story—nothing. So then I thought, “Well, I can always go to weather, because he’s right here.” So we went to weather, and he talked and he talked and he talked. Came back to me. I said, “I think we have everything straightened out,” I pitched to the first story again, and a commercial came up. I mean, it was like this the whole newscast. We call it “Black Saturday” over at Channel 10.
Well, after the newscast, the owner of the station—this name may mean nothing to anybody—Tom Chauncey, who was the long-time owner of that station, and partners with Gene Autry—called us, and he said, “What happened?” And we said, “We had a power surge, everything went bad,” and he said, “Well, that’s unfortunate. I’m here at the Biltmore Hotel in a hotel room with a couple of visitors that came into town, and I wanted to show off my station and how well we were doing. The visitors are Dick Salant”—who was the president of CBS News—“and Walter Cronkite.” And I thought, “Well, I never wanted to work in New York anyway, and it doesn’t really matter.” But then I started thinking, “You know, Walter Cronkite probably had a newscast or two just like that,” and probably was the one that understood it the most.
I’m glad to take this opportunity to spend some time with you today, partly because it seems like recently I have been to quite a few schools, and the oldest group I’ve talked to are sixth-graders. And it’s kind of nice to talk to some adults and people who are on the verge of doing what they want to do, possibly in this business or related fields. Because the sixth-graders have a little different—first of all, a lot of them don’t know who I am, they don’t watch TV, or they certainly don’t watch TV news. Well, they watch TV, but not TV news. And their questions are a little different. I usually get things like, “Who’s the prettiest co-anchor you’ve ever worked with? Do you sometimes wear shorts behind that desk, and not wear pants? What’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened? What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened?” And then, of course, the question that they always ask several times, because I don’t always answer it, is “How much money do you make?” So it is good to meet with some people who have perhaps some really good criticisms of what we do. And that’s really what I like to hear. We’re going to open this up for questions a little bit later, and that’s how I’ll kind of get a sense of what you think of television news, and ways that we could improve it.
Julie mentioned that I was born in Phoenix, at Good Samaritan Hospital. In fact, my dad was born in Arizona. My grandfather was born in Arizona. And my dad was actually a broadcaster. He was one of the radio pioneers at KOY Radio years ago, and then he actually got a TV program at Channel 5. It was kind of a western variety topical show once a week. We had to go out and buy a TV set just because my dad was going to be on TV. Grew up in a very large family, we didn’t have a lot of money, five girls and one brother plus me. This was a big event for us. But even though my dad was in radio and then he had the TV show, I never really thought in terms of making this a profession. It wasn’t something I dreamed about for years. So getting into television for me was more by accident. I was just an average student in high school, went on to my first year at ASU, and after one year….
(cell phone rings) That’s probably my desk saying that there’s spot news somewhere and I need to go.
I actually wanted to be a lawyer, maybe go into business, didn’t really have any designs to get into television. At the beginning of the summer after my freshman year, a good friend of mine called and said, “Hey, I’ve got a great adventure, if you’re interested. I can train you to be a disc jockey” at this very small radio station up in Utah. And I said, “Man, that sounds great!” So I packed my stuff, went up there, and spent a fun summer just working as a night-time disc jockey for about $3.50 an hour, and was totally happy with that, and kind of got a taste of broadcasting from that standpoint. Well, that summer I also decided to take a couple of courses in broadcasting, which I did. I liked them, and so I changed my major and got a degree in radio and television.
However, when I moved back to Phoenix, tried to get a job in this business, it was tough. Didn’t have any offers, so I got into other things. I actually joined my uncle in a family business. He had some gas stations, and I opened up two gas stations that had car washes.
About that time, my efforts of knocking on the doors here at the local stations paid off, and I was contacted and asked if I wanted to do just part-time radio news at what was then KOOL Radio, which was a part of Channel 10, which of course they’ve changed the call letters now. It was KOOL Radio & TV, and they wanted me to do radio news, and I was just excited.
Let me go back a little bit. One of my dad’s first days in this business was at KOY and it was a Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. He was on duty the morning of Pearl Harbor. My first day, I had to go in at about three in the morning and just do some writing for radio, and I walked in and the place is just buzzing. Well, I hadn’t been listening to my car radio, because it was broken; didn’t realize that that was the morning after the night that Robert Kennedy was shot. So my first day was rather adventuresome too. My son Joe, who is now at Channel 12, his first job was in Flagstaff, Arizona, and he was hired to write and report for their early-morning show, and his first day was September 11, 2001. So all three of us have had kind of an interesting first day in this business, and it certainly got our adrenalin going for us.
So anyhow, I started the gas stations. I happened to own them during the oil embargo of 1973. You guys are probably way too young to even know about this, but lines at gas stations and everything. And because I was part-time at KOOL, Bill Close, who was then the main anchor, the news director, he ran the news department, talked me into opening up my stations at midnight every night, without the lights on, so that we could fill up the news cars. Otherwise, these cars would be empty that next morning, and they couldn’t go out and cover news.
I worked there for about six years, doing weekend news. And let me just tell you how I started doing weekend anchoring, because I was a reporter and loving it. That’s still my first love, is just getting out and reporting. And one Friday Bill Close called me into his office and he said, “Our weekend anchor has just quit.” And by the way, his name was Ted Knight. Now, for you TV history buffs, there’s a little bit of a connection there. He was the famous anchor on “The Mary Tyler [Moore] Show.” But anyway, his name was Ted Knight, he’d quit, and what they said was, “What we would like to do is try you out as an anchor.” This was Friday. He said, “You’ll anchor both Saturday and Sunday, and then we’re going to meet Monday morning and make a decision to see how you did.” Well, people say, “Were you nervous?” Yes I was nervous. I got up Saturday morning, and for the first time since I was sixteen, I had a pimple on my nose, and spent a very frustrating and pressure-filled weekend. But it apparently worked out, because then I started doing the weekend anchoring there. But then I still got to report during the week.
Spent about six years there, and then in 1979 Channel 12 called and asked if I’d be interested in working for them, which I did for about twenty-five years, until a little over a year ago when we were up for contracts again, and I was approached out of the blue by Channel 5, had no intention of switching, didn’t want to move, all my friends were at 12. We had some negotiations back and forth, and I certainly wasn’t asking Channel 12 to match anything that 5 did. I was very happy to stay there, but I wanted them to show a little bit of interest in keeping me, and apparently they were going through some times where they thought that maybe a new face would be good for them too, so I made the switch. Anyway, I sat out for six months, because that was in my contract, that if I did leave for any reason, I couldn’t be on anybody’s air for six months. But I was getting paid, so that’s not all bad. My wife thought that was a great plan! Except the fact that she wanted me out of the house once in a while.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed the transition. I was very worried, I was scared, I was nervous. People said, “Well, it���s like riding a bike, you just go sit down and start anchoring again.” I wasn’t sure of that. But they’ve been very kind to me over at Channel 5 and I’ve enjoyed that.
I’d like to talk a little bit about the kinds of stories that I’ve covered, not just sitting at the anchor desk. The fun part of my job is to report. And I’ve been lucky. Back when I was at Channel 12, it seemed like any time there was a huge disaster in California, I was on the next plane and covering fires and riots and flooding and earthquakes, the O. J. Simpson trial. I was also the first Phoenix reporter to be sent to Oklahoma City when the bombing occurred. Spent about six days doing that kind of reporting. To me that’s really the fun part of this job, is to get out and do stories and meet with people and try to put on something that the audience understands and can relate to.
But the most favorite story that I’ve ever done was actually a series of stories, about a thousand of them. Some of you who happened to watch Channel 12 over the last few years might remember a series that I did called “Wednesday’s Child.” “Wednesday’s Child” was an effort on our part to match up kids that didn’t have homes, with people who might be interested in adopting. Right now there’s about close to 5,000 children in Arizona who have either been abandoned, they’ve been abused and taken from their families, they were born with severe handicaps and therefore their parents didn’t want to keep them—a whole variety of reasons—but there’s a big chunk of those kids here in our state. And so we thought, “Let’s try to come up with something that would give these kids a chance to perhaps meet families and be adopted.” And so we came up with a story idea called “Wednesday’s Child,” where once a week I would spend time with these kids individually, sometimes sibling groups—two, three, four, five kids—and do an activity that they liked to do, try to get them to warm up, talk about their life and their hopes. In some cases, they were really little—one and two and three. Sometimes they couldn’t talk, they didn’t have that ability. But then we would introduce them on this special program, “Wednesday’s Child,” which was actually part of the newscast. It was during our ten o’clock newscast. And the neat thing for me was that over this period of twenty years, again, we met about a thousand kids, and about 80% of them were adopted, they found homes. And that was very rewarding to me personally. It was really a tangible example of how television can impact lives. To this day I get occasionally calls or letters or e-mails from some of these kids that we met over the years, and that still continues to be a very rewarding thing for me.
Now, on the downside—this is just a little bit of dirt—we had a change of news directors who came in and made the decision that “Wednesday’s Child” was not news, that it needs to be taken away from the ten o’clock—in fact, taken away from the afternoon news—and they started running them at 5 a.m. And I think we have nine people watching at 5 a.m. It ceased to be effective, and it frustrated me, and so we parted ways on that series. And hopefully we’re going to be able to bring it back in a different form on Channel 5.
Anyway, people over the years have said, “Well, were you ever tempted to adopt any of these kids?” Well yeah! I mean, some of them just went right to your heart, and it was tough doing that series sometimes. These two little girls, I remember we were in Yuma once, the one was about three, one was about six, and we were at a park and playing and everything, and I had to go back and pick up some more tape from the car, and the little six-year-old said, “Can I go with you?” And I said, “Yes.” We’re walking along and all of a sudden she reaches up and she takes my hand and she says, “Would you be my daddy?” And it was like…. You know, those are the stories that really get to you.
And it’s not a tribute to me, or even Channel 12, that all these kids were adopted. I think it’s a tribute, really, to the people in the state. You know, when people understand a problem, they generally respond to it in a way that sometimes surprises you. We featured once this group of five kids, African Americans, oldest was about twelve, youngest was about four or five, but they wanted to stay together. We knew that would be tough, because there are not a lot of black families on the adoption registry, and it would take somebody to really be committed to want to adopt them. And so I decided to take them swimming at my house. I asked them, “Do you guys swim?” And they said, “Oh yeah, we swim every day!” “Well, good!” So we went to my house and got our suits on, and the photographer said, “Well, I’ve got an idea. I’m going to set up on the other side of the pool. You guys come running out of the house, and all of you jump in the pool at the same time.” I said, “That sounds like a good way to start it.” So he got all set up, we got all ready, we go running out, we jump in the water, laughing, and all of a sudden I look around, and two of them are at the bottom of the pool. And so there was this moment of panic, and I got them out and everything. I said, “I thought you guys said you swam every day!” Well, to them, swimming was this pool in their back yard that was about this deep, and they’d never been in a big pool.
But the neat thing was that two weeks later there was a family that came forward and said they wanted to adopt all five of these kids. I was just amazed, I was floored. And I told the adoption worker, “Well, you tell them how grateful I am that they’re going to do this, and would they contact me when the adoption is final, because I want to do a follow-up story.” Well about six months later she called and said, “The adoption is final, but they don’t want to do a follow-up story because they don’t think they’ve done anything special.” And I said, “Well, you tell them that I think that they have.” Well, about a year went by, year and a half, and I was at the airport one day, waiting for a plane, and here comes this family walking down the concourse. It was a mom and dad and eight kids. And I started looking at some of these kids, and they just looked real familiar, and then I realized that it was the five kids that I had had in my back yard and almost drowned two of them.
So I went up to the parents and I just said, “You know, I feel bad because I never had a chance to thank you personally for what you did. That was amazing.” And they said, “You know, we feel bad, because we never called you to thank you for bringing these kids into our lives.” Well, it’s times like that, when what we do in TV really pays off. That will always be, I guess, my favorite kind of story that I did. It certainly wasn’t hard news, it wasn’t going to the scene of a disaster, it wasn’t exposing some politician, but it was affecting someone’s life, and that made it fun to do and interesting to do.
When I was given the assignment to cover the O. J. Simpson trial, my son Joe happened to be the editor of the Apollo High School newspaper. He was a senior, he was the editor, and he said, “Dad, you’re going over to L.A. to cover the trial?” And I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “I’d like to go with you and do a story on the media madness, something that high school kids could relate to.” And I said, “Sure, that’d be great.” So we flew over on a Sunday night, the trial was set to open Monday. And I’ll never forget, it was a rainy, rainy night in L.A. and we thought we’d drive by the courthouse, just to kind of get the lay of the land, where we were with the hotel and everything. And when we drove by the courthouse, we could see about five people with sleeping bags and coolers, and they’re just lined up there. So we stopped and went up to talk to them. And these were young students, high school, mostly college. And we said, “What are you doing here?” And they said, “We want to get into the trial, and we want to be first in line.” So of course Joe’s eyes light up, and he says, “Dad, I think I’d like to stay here with them. Is that okay?” And I’m thinking, “Oh, this is great, the middle of L.A., it’s a rainy night, a bunch of strangers, and he’s going to spend the night on the courthouse steps.” So I said, “Okay, just don’t tell your mom.”
So we went back to the hotel, got a blanket and a pillow, and he came back, and I didn’t sleep very well that night. In fact, he doesn’t know, but I got up a couple of times and just drove by, just to make sure that everybody was fine. But then he found out the next morning that it wasn’t first in line gets in, it was a lottery, and by now there’s sixty people, and there were only eight seats for the general public. So they passed out cards, and lo and behold, his name was drawn. So he went in for the first day of the trial. In fact, of the four days that we were there, he got in three times. And the only way I got in was when he loaned me his pass for the afternoon session. But he not only got to see the trial, but he interviewed the attorney, Shapiro. He interviewed O. J.’s grandmother. He got on CNN one day, because as he was coming out, something big had happened, and he was the most recent one out of the trial. So now he’s on national TV, doing his analysis of the O. J. Simpson trial. And when he got home, he wrote a story—he was one of the writers for the Rep, the high school version of the Republic—and it was such a good story they put it in the regular paper. So I was real proud of him, and always thought that he would be a newspaper journalist, but he decided that he would get into my field and get into TV. And for those of you that want to switch back and forth, he’s doing a good job. I’m very proud of him.
Young people are always asking me, “Well, what courses should I take that would help me become a broadcaster, get into broadcasting?” And I always tell them that there’s six courses that they have to master: “English, writing, English, writing, English, and writing.” People think if TV as pictures and visuals and exciting stuff, but you know, TV is really good writing. And if you enjoy writing, and if you enjoy telling a good story, that’s half the battle, because I’ll tell ya’, some of the young people that apply at TV stations cannot write a lick. And I don’t know what’s happening with our schools. They seem to have forgotten this part of it, or something, and all the good writers are going into newspapers, I guess, because the ones that are coming into TV, it’s painful to read sometimes. So we spend quite a bit of our time working with these people. We have a pretty good internship program at Channel 5. In fact, it’s the best one, I think, in the city. I think all the stations have an internship program of some kind, and it’s usually kids that are in college, maybe it’s their junior year, maybe their senior year, and they’ll spend three months with us, three or four months, and we try to give them a taste of everything. They’ll spend time on the assignment desk; they’ll spend time with the producers; they’ll spend time with editors, with photographers. They’ll go out on stories, and they get a pretty good idea of what the business is like. And so I would encourage anyone who’s interested when you get to that level, to go ahead and apply for an internship, if TV is something that you want to do. And let me just ask right now, how many of you are actually journalism students? Just your group? And you’re mostly newspaper? Is there anybody in the room that has any interest in getting into TV? Two.
STUDENT: I want to do radio.
DANA: That’d be good. And you raised your hand?
STUDENT: I want to do TV.
DANA: In what area?
STUDENT: Here, just like you, around the city. [unclear] Channel 5 or Channel 12.
DANA: Okay. Phoenix is a great market to work in. I lucked out, because most people get out of college; if they’re lucky, their first job is in Fresno, or it’s in Biloxi, or it’s in Bangor, Maine, or it’s in some little small market, far, far away. And then they move up. The whole thing in my business is you try to get up into a bigger market and get into a little more experience. When I started in Phoenix, it was the thirty-sixth-largest market in the country. Today it’s the fourteenth. So I’ve moved up all these spaces, and I’ve never had to pack a bag and move to another town. So I’ve really lucked out in that sense.
Phoenix is very, very competitive. As you know, everybody’s doing news and doing a pretty good job of it. It’s pretty cutthroat. We’re in ratings right now, and it’s a battle. It really is a battle, but it’s a fun battle, and those of us who are in it, for the most part wouldn’t do anything else. One of the downsides for me is that I have never, ever, had a normal schedule. I was doing weekends for about six years at Channel 10, and then when I went over to Channel 12 it was always from about one in the afternoon until ten or eleven at night. So that can be kind of tough on families. I’ve got six kids, they grew up knowing me in the summer, but in the winter they’d get up and go to school, and they’d come home and I’d be gone. I’d get home and they were in bed. So those are some of the things you have to kind of think of.
Also, you’re always on call if something big happens. If you’re out for the evening or on a weekend or whatever, if something big happens, they get ahold of you. So the key is, you turn off your cell phone. You’re always kind of attached to the station. If you’re available and you’re the person that they want for that story, you’re going to be called. But other than that, I cannot think of a better job and a better profession. I never have the same day twice. There’s always a new day and always something different. I don’t think I could go to work and kind of do the same thing every day. And that���s the nice thing about being in news, whether it’s television, radio, or newspaper, every day is going to be different. Every day there’s going to be a new story, every day there’s going to be a new challenge. And because of the creativity involved, and being able to find that fact that no one else has, or break a story, then it just makes it fun. It’s just a great job, and I can’t think of any…. The only other job that I would ever do is a bricklayer. And I’ve done that just on my own, and I’m pretty good at it. It’s very therapeutic. It’s a set amount of space and a certain kind of wall, and you just lay the bricks, and then there’s a great satisfaction. And twenty years from now, the brick wall will still be there. So I guess if I wasn’t doing this, I would be laying bricks.
I want to open it up to your questions, and I’ll try to answer as best as I can, as honestly as I can, anything that you might want to know about what we do. And if you have complaints, now’s your time to talk back to a news anchor. I know many of you have done it at home when you’re watching sometimes. Now’s your chance to put those thoughts into words.
STUDENT: So you went from doing radio to television. What are the major big differences, and what ultimately made you decide to stay in television? Is it better? Or did you have any reservations about doing [unclear]?
DANA: The biggest difference is I’m wearing makeup now. (class chuckles) Well, the biggest difference—I really like radio news. I like doing radio…. I mean, there’s just something about, you know, you get up, you just go to work. You don’t have to worry about what you look like or anything. But I think you can be a little more creative with radio. I’ve always felt like a good job would be like radio news at KTAR or one of the stations—good local news, where they go out and do stories, and they have a big-enough staff that they can spend the time doing it. In television, you’re always working in tandem with a photographer, you’re always trying to think visually, “How can I visualize this story?” And that sometimes holds you back a little bit in what you write. Because I can write a pretty good story, but if the photographer says, “Wait a minute, I have nothing to cover this, I have nothing to cover this.” So it’s more of a team thing in television. That’s really the main difference. Television news is changing so much because of the Internet. If you wanted to find out something that was happening right now, it would take you three minutes to go to the Internet, and you could find out everything you’re going to find out on our news tonight. So our challenge is to try to come up with stories that maybe you’re not going to find on the Internet, or a different approach to a story, or somehow get you to watch, because back when I started—she mentioned Bill Close—Bill Close was one of—there were only three stations. Well, there were four, I guess, with Channel 8. But there were only three commercial stations. And this generation doesn’t understand that. Three?! Three stations?! And because of that, Bill Close’s audience—they would get between 40% and 55% of the audience. That’s huge! That’s huge. Today, if we get 12% or 14%, we’ve had a real good day. Again, because there’s a lot more TV stations, and then you’ve got all the other choices on the TV dial. You can go anywhere and get your news.
STUDENT: There used to be newspapers, and then radio came along, then television. But now with the Internet and podcasts and everything, it seems like that’s sort of more cutting-edge news. Do you think that’s where the future is going? Like, should journalism students today try to get into television broadcasting, or should they try to go somewhere else?
DANA: I think you need to be versatile. I think you ought to be able to do all of it. One of the things that my son Joe has heads and shoulders over me, is he had a lot of Internet training, and he can do a lot of that new electronic stuff that his dad can’t, or wasn’t trained on. So the key is to be versatile. Now, most of the TV stations, ours included, we put our news, or a good portion of it, on the ’net right now. If you go to our website you can get the latest news. Well, I say the latest—it’s not always the latest, but it’s within three hours. And we’re getting better at that, trying to update stuff as it changes. But yeah, the key is to be versatile. I don’t think that we will ever…. I think that people who live in a town will always want to know what’s happening in their town. Therefore, you’re going to have to have some sort of a local news-gathering operation. And whether it ends up on a cable or on the ’net or whatever, doesn’t matter, but you’re always going to need your local news. But the days of the dominating network news are over, and I think the days of a dominating local TV station are over. But there’s always going to be a niche. Other questions?
JULIE: I’m curious about the diversity that we see in the media, and how cognizant is the media to issues of diversity? I think back to Hurricane Katrina, and how certain phrases are used with certain populations. How is the bias looked at? Is there real effort to make sure things are sensitive?
DANA: Yes. Half the time management runs scared, because they’re not purposely trying to be insensitive, but sometimes it just happens. They run scared when it comes to hiring people. They run scared when it comes to coverage. They really do try to balance it out, to the point of occasionally doing stories that wouldn’t be covered if it wasn’t for the effort to balance things out in the arena that you’re talking about. And we are very sensitive. Management tries to educate us in terms of the need to do that, and we really do have that.
JULIE: When you’re looking at the ratings right now, do they just aggregate the data? Do they look at specific populations, even gender, to see what connections we’re making [unclear]?
DANA: Oh, you’re very astute.
JULIE: I’m real interested.
DANA: Let me tell you how they measure the ratings. First of all, has anybody ever been asked to keep a diary or put a little item on your TV set to measure what you’re watching? (someone raises her hand) You have?
STUDENT: In San Diego.
DANA: Was it the diary, or was it the little box that fits on your TV?
STUDENT: The diary.
DANA: The diary. There used to be two ways they would take ratings. One was the diary, where they come to your house and they give you a diary that’s good for one month. And all they ask you to do is, every day when you turn on the TV, just say what time you’re turning it on, and what you’re watching. And they give you a little prize or fifty bucks or something. They make it a little bit worth your while. The other way was phone calls. They used to do ratings by phone calls on a twenty-four-hour basis. They had a phone bank of people that would just call up and say, “What are you watching right now? What are you watching right now?” And so it was two different companies: it was the ARB [Audience Research Board (?)] and the Nielsen Company. Well, now there’s only one company, and it’s Nielsen, and for the most part they come to your house and they say, “Can we attach this box to your TV set for a month?,” or “two months,” or “five months.” And what they try to do is get the demographics of a city. In other words, they kind of know what the age breakdown is, what the ethnic breakdown is, and so they’ll try to go to areas of the town, so that that measurement reflects what’s in the city.
Now, what they don’t know—and they can’t tell—is Johnny comes home from school and turns on the TV, and then walks out of the room and goes and plays a video game. Okay, now the TV’s on, and it might be on during the news. That TV set represents about 14,000 homes. And what that is telling the company then, is that there’s 14,000 people watching their news. Well maybe not. Maybe Johnny’s off on the Internet looking at something he shouldn’t look at. But his TV set is on to that, and therefore that’s the measurement. So it’s not an exact science.
We do ratings four times a year. We’re in the November ratings now. It’s November, February, May, and July. There are some markets that now have ratings 365 days a year, which I think is more accurate, because what you’ll notice is right now, this is when we put on the sexiest stories, the grabber stories, the transvestites who play in the symphony, or whatever we come up with. And we really push for these times of year to get you to watch something, so that you’ll at least tune in. But I think it’s a much more honest measurement when they measure us every day, because then there’s no surge and up and down and everything. Other questions? Yeah.
STUDENT: A lot of complaints I’ve heard in the past have been about the news focuses primarily on the negatives that happen around us. Do you think that if the news were to take a more positive swing and try to even it out and go, say, more on the positive side, do you think that the news could still succeed and still get high ratings?
DANA: That’s a very good question, and I agree that we do put more, much more of the negative, that is an unfair representation of our society. On the other side of the coin, your second half was, “Could a station succeed by putting more, if not all, good news?” No, it couldn’t. And I used to have two mock newspapers that I would bring in, and each one had their own headlines. And this one, most of the headlines were “School Bond Issue Passes,” “Governor Gets Award” for this, “Five-year-old Rescues Cat from Toilet.” All these things were generally good things. This one is more “Football Coach Gets Caught With Three Cheerleaders in his Bedroom,” “Mass Killing on the West Side, Eight People Dead, Four Heads Are Cut Off.” The point is, if I held that up, your eyes would go over here quick, and you’d want to know these things. When you’re driving down the freeway, some of the worst traffic jams in an accident are not in the lane where the accident is, it’s the oncoming lane, where people can see this accident. Everybody wants to take a look at the accident. They want to see a little blood, they want to see a body out there. That’s just kind of human nature. And sadly, that’s what TV feeds off of. There’s a saying, “If it bleeds, it leads,” in our business. And we will generally lead with the more sensational, attention-grabbing stories. I can tell you what everybody’s going to lead with tonight. You may not be aware of this—and this story lasted less than an hour: in Mesa this morning, a mother in a fairly new Tahoe has her six-month-old and her two-year-old in the back. She pulls up to a friend’s house, runs in for something, leaves her key in her car, the car is stolen, the kids are still in it, there��s an Amber Alert. Luckily, the thief had the sense to turn around and realized he’s got some young kids in here, and didn’t want any part of this, and he abandoned the car at a restaurant, and the kids are reunited with the family. At least two, maybe three, of the TV stations were over the scene. You see the father come up, and his kids and everything. That will probably…. Now that’s not really a bad-news story, but it’s a dramatic story, certainly, because you see the ending of it, and you see the kids reunited with their family. Unless something else happens today that tops that, that will probably lead every newscast tonight. That’s my prediction—and I haven’t even been to the station yet. Other questions?
STUDENT: My brother is an editor at a Tucson news station, and he has a good relationship with some of the TV anchors. Do you think it’s important to establish relationships with the people behind the camera?
DANA: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Her question is, “Do you think it’s important to establish good relationships between the anchors and the people behind [the scenes].” You know, they can make you look so good, and they can make you look so bad. I won’t tell you which station, and I won’t tell you which gender���in fact, I’ll tell you nothing, except there’s a person working in this market who acts like this person is really above those people. She…. (class laughs) This person orders them around, demands things that are silly, and this person is paying the price. I mean, it’s so stupid, and it’s silly, and luckily there’s not many of them that do that, but occasionally it happens. Some of my best friends are the people behind the scenes, because they’re more genuine—most of the time. Other questions?
STUDENT: Do you think the news actually forms—will occasionally form a bias in its effort to be politically correct?
DANA: Sure. Yeah, we do. Hopefully not often. But a lot of times it’s a kind of a feeding frenzy with news organizations, and they jump on a certain theme or a certain assumption, and just in the way they report it, it can form a bias. I think that’s true. But you know most of the time there’s someone in the room that recognizes that, and they try to end it.
I know some of you have another class to go to. If any of you ever want to come down to the station during a newscast, you can sit right there in the studio and watch everything unfold. It’s kind of a cheap date, and you’re certainly welcome to just call sometime and invite yourselves down, and we’ll try to give you a quick tour and show you what we do.
STUDENT: Is that common? Do a lot of people do that?
DANA: Not as common as the invitations I’ve given out, no. I mean, sometimes….
STUDENT: Do you have a little audience off to the side during every broadcast?
DANA: No, sometimes we’ll have groups of up to ten. Sometimes like a Cub Scout group or some journalism group from somewhere. The other thing I’ve done is I’ve given a lot of high school and grammar school graduation speeches, and there’s always a story I tell at the end. And what I say is, after I tell the story, I issue them a challenge. I say, “Look, if any of you can call me in four years, either after you graduate from high school or college, and tell me this story back, I will take you and a friend a dinner to any restaurant in town that you want to go to.” And over the years, I’ve taken a lot of kids to dinners. One year one kid was so anxious after his high school graduation, that he leaped over the—the cell phone was in his car—and he leaped over the fence, his robe caught on the fence, rips off his robe, and he makes it to his dad’s car and called me and there were like three others that called after that. I’ve had kids stop me in malls, and they’ll start telling me the story. I said, “Hey, it’s too late, your class graduated a long time ago.” But anyway…. Any other questions?
STUDENT: You talked about time being irregular, and your schedule not being normal. Is there anything that ever makes you want to leave the business and go open a bricklaying business?
DANA: (laughs) There are days when that really sounds good. But no. The next day might be much better. When you’re doing a story, like in California, like for the earthquakes and stuff, that day starts at seven in the morning usually, and doesn’t end until midnight or one or two. And so those are the days where you just collapse and say, “What am I doing in this business?!” But those are also where the adrenalin is pumping a little stronger, and it’s kind of fun. But I’ve never considered quitting … but there’s still time.
STUDENT: Do you guys today have any rules about verifying stories, that they’re true before broadcasting?
DANA: Oh, absolutely. And that’s part of the ethics that are learned, like at the basic level in college, where you…. We have made a few mistakes, but not too many, because there’s always somebody who’s asking a question, “Are we sure about this? Are we sure about this?” And there have been times when we have known a fact or we’ve been told a fact, and we haven’t put it on the air, another station has, and then of course we verify it, it’s true, but we will not put it on unless we verify it. And even in that process we’ve made mistakes. But it’s not on purpose. There’s never an effort to put something on just to be first, if you have not checked it out. At least that’s our rule. Other questions? Yes?
STUDENT: I’ve been told that pretty much in any journalist’s career life somewhere through time they’re going to think about at least falsifying a quote, a fact, a whole story—something along those lines. Have you ever been in that situation?
DANA: Yeah, I really wasn’t born at Good Samaritan Hospital. I was born at St. Joseph’s. (laughter) You know, I suppose the temptation is there, but no, the pressure’s never been that great to where you…. Yeah, you think about it, but it’s like a lot of things you think about that you never do.
You guys have been great! Nobody asked me what I made. This is great! When these young kids ask me, I say, “Well, how much do you make babysitting or doing a lawn?” They’ll tell me, and I say, “I make a little more than that.”
STUDENT: Who’s the prettiest anchorwoman you’ve ever [worked with]?
DANA: (laughs) You know, I’ve been lucky. In thirty-one years of anchoring, I can name practically on one hand the number of co-anchors. And most people in my business, there’s so much switching and trading around. My very first co-anchor was Linda Alvarez, who is still anchoring. She’s in Los Angeles. She’s a senior citizen, and that’s neat, because women generally don’t last as long as men in this business, and she’s right up there and doing very well. Patty Kirkpatrick was my second co-anchor, and she’s at Channel 3 right now. Jeanine Ford was my third. She’s still at Channel 12. Lin Sue Cooney was my fourth, and she’s at Channel 12. Fay [Fredricks] is still at Channel 12. And then the two that I have now, Diana and Catherine [Anaya]. I’ve been lucky.
STUDENT: How do you feel about the movie “Anchorman”?
DANA: I loved it! I thought that was hilarious. There were enough funny moments in there that were pretty close to being true, that I thought it was a great movie.
STUDENT: Aside from the anchor brawls.
DANA: Yeah, besides some of the crazy stuff, yeah. But no, it was funny. We actually had at Channel 12 in the early days, our weekend people. They had mixed up their names on the introduction, and the guy read his name as hers, and she read hers as his! And then there was this kind of, “Oh … what did we just say?” So some of [the movie] was very true.
STUDENT: So you did a story where they were talking about lie detector tests, and they asked you if you enjoyed working with Lin Sue.
DANA: Uh-huh.
STUDENT: What was the answer to that? And was it true when you said it?
DANA: The answer was “definitely,” and it was true. And my only regret with that story is that the promotion department got their slimy fingers on it, and they made too much of that question, leading up to the time we ran the story. In fact, I went in and said, “We gotta take this off the air.” And they didn’t listen to me. So that was kind of a black day for me. Lin Sue didn’t hold it against me, but her mother-in-law sent me a scathing letter. We’ve since made up, but she was not happy with that.
Other questions?
STUDENT: Do you think that the ratings get in the way of telling the stories that you really want to tell?
DANA: Yes.
STUDENT: I mean, do you think if you did that 365 days a year, [unclear]?
DANA: No. And the reason it wouldn’t is because you can’t have that kind of pressure 365 days a year. The stations have the luxury of putting pressure on for twenty-eight days solid. Then they can kind of relax. If it’s the same pressure all the time, then there’s no sense in…. You know, you can only do so much. I think it’d be better, and it’d be more honest.
STUDENT: To tell the stories that are really important (DANA: Right.) rather than just what’s sensational?
DANA: Right. (pause) Well, thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed being here. You’re a good audience.
(applause)
[END OF RECORDING]